Happy Now?

I had hoped after Friday’s absolute catastrophe of a day that the country might somehow magically rally over the weekend. I mean, when you plunge your country into possible ruin on the promise of a golden future that will allow it to rise like a phoenix from the flames, you have a plan, right?

As it turns out, you don’t. The only person that seems to have any plan at all, and be acting on it rather than just spouting meaningless Churchillian rhetoric is Nicola Sturgeon, and I can’t even vote for her.

I was distraught and angry on Friday. I had hoped to feel better by today. Instead I am running on barely controlled rage and getting more enraged by the moment.

Here are a few things I am furious about:

Firstly, leave voters telling me to calm down. I’m sorry, many of you are my friends and family but you do not get to say this. I’m not angry at you individually. I’m angry at where we are and more, I’m incandescent at the way we got here. I have a right to be angry. I’m in the boat with you and I don’t like where we’re going. I have very little option with regard to getting out of the boat, and I’d feel happier if someone was actually steering it, but they’re not. I’m sorry if my anger makes you uncomfortable, but you have the choice to not to speak to me, or unfriend me if you feel better doing that. Please do, because I don’t think I’m going to get any less angry for quite some time.

Secondly, people telling me that this is democracy and I have to live with it. You know what? The referendum vote was simply one part of the democratic process, and as I keep mentioning to those who conveniently forget it, it was ‘Advisory,’ not legally binding. The vote itself is not ‘democracy’. Democracy doesn’t happen on one day for one vote and then go away again. Democracy is an ongoing process in which we are free to express ourselves however we see fit as long as we do not descend into hate speech (which I haven’t). Democracy is part of a process and is happening all the time. I have the democratic right to fight against decisions made on my behalf that I don’t like, and I don’t like this one, so I am fighting it every step of the way. Do not throw the word democracy in my face. It is not a trump card.

Thirdly, people telling me that what we have to do now is ‘pull together’ to ‘make this country great.’ Not one single person who has chastised me with the ‘pulling together’ line has actually answered me when I’ve asked how they’re going to do that. Unless you’re a millionaire or a business owner, or a politician, there are very few ways you can ‘pull together’ unless you’re going to get politically active. Like the term ‘democracy,’ it is being used in a way that is actually meaningless. Mostly, as far as I can see it is being used as short hand for ‘Don’t blame me. Don’t ask me. Don’t question me. I need to feel better about this and your questions are stopping me doing that.’ Sorry, not buying it. Tell me how you’re genuinely going to help our country ‘pull together’ and I’ll listen. Otherwise please shut up.

And I am doing something. I have joined a political party. I have joined the electoral reform society. I am attending a solidarity rally tomorrow for our city. I have signed petitions, however futile they might seem. I am taking action. I am attempting to get us out of this shit. I am reading everything I can find across every media source I can get to educate myself about what is happening to my country. I’m not cherry picking what I want to see and turning a blind eye to everything else.

What are you doing?

Fourthly, to the people who have actually said: ‘Enough now. I’m bored of this.’ Did you really think it would all be done and dusted by Friday tea time? As I said in my last post, this is the beginning of something that is going to have seismic repercussions for our country for years. Prepare to be bored witless, and frankly, don’t complain to me. I don’t have time to be bored. I’m too busy being horrified and upset.

Fifthly. Please, please don’t repeatedly tell me we are ‘Free’ now. We are not free. We are still in the EU, and with nobody willing to pull the trigger on article fifty, we may well be there for a good deal longer. Even if we had done it on Friday, please tell me how much freer you are, in real terms. If you can’t point to anything, please feel free to shut up. And what are you doing with that precious new freedom? Please enlighten me.

Sixthly: I am watching, over the last few days, in absolute horror as the far right start to move out of the shadows and back into centre stage again. My time line has been pinging with people reporting hate crime. There’s even a Twitter feed for it where they are gathering information in order to report it. It’s appearing in reports on my community Facebook page. It’s in my daughter’s school. It’s like someone took the lid off Pandora’s Box. Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. Don’t tell me that reports can be twisted. Maybe they can, but it’s being taken seriously enough by everyone that matters and it is tabled for discussion in the House of Commons this week. It’s not as if they haven’t got other things to talk about. It’s happening and I’m appalled but sadly, not surprised.

Apropos of this, please do not tell me: ‘I’m not a racist’ if you voted leave. I get that, but I said that it would open the door to the far right, and it has and to pretend it hasn’t, and to not look or think about it is cowardly. And to say ‘I’m not a racist,’ is to imply that I’m making all this about you. I’m not, but I have a right to get angry and upset about the consequences of a decision you were a part of, however noble your intentions.

Seventhly, to the people who are saying we are now able to govern ourselves and we are free of the unelected shackles of Brussels dictating to us. Farage is unelected. Gove/Boris or whoever takes over from Cameron will be unelected. The House of Lords is unelected. The queen, who keeps being wheeled out as a symbol of our great democracy for reasons I cannot understand, is unelected. You are being taken into the future by largely unelected fuckwits who have already lied to you and broken every promise you gave them power for. Do not talk to me about the shackles of Brussels.

Eighthly gets several paragraphs because it’s such a clusterfuck.

Our government has imploded in on itself. Cameron made one, cowardly speech on Friday and bailed on us. Now most of the conservatives are too busy fighting about who is going to be the inheritor of the steaming turd bequeathed by Cameron to do anything useful for us.

George Osborne, who only came out of hiding this morning and said ‘the economy is strong.’ This is not borne out in the annuities market crashing, RBS and Barclays suspending trading and the pound dropping like a stone, again. So for all those of you who smilingly told me that everything was fine and it was all over by Friday tea time, what say you now?

And I reiterate. This is only the start.

Boris finally emerging yesterday. His statement was not a statement, it was an article he wrote because that’s his job, and he got paid £5,000 to do it. He has admitted that he wants to stay in Europe, however Europe will have him. This means that we go to the single market or EEA. This means, for those of you who don’t know by now, that we pay the same amount into the EU as we have done previously in order to trade with them. It means that we still have to comply with all their trading regulations. It means that we still have to allow freedom of movement across borders. The one thing it doesn’t mean is that we get to keep our veto. So we have gambled everything for less. None of the things the leavers want will happen, but we will also be much worse off in almost every conceivable way. This basically means that what the leave campaigners fought for and won, was Boris’ ambition to run the country, not the ‘freedom’ of the nation.

Daniel Hannan, a major player in the leave campaign who voted to be ‘tough’ on immigration, has now back tracked on his promise and actually left twitter for a month because he’s exhausted from campaigning. How convenient. I already covered the lies about the £350 million, which have become more and more byzantine as the weekend has progressed.

Then there’s the implosion of the Labour party under Corbyn with MPs resigning in droves from his cabinet and a vote of no confidence expected any moment. I have seen both sides of the argument on Twitter and I am ashamed of them all. It smacks of fiddling while Rome burns.

In the meantime, Farage has suggested that the sensible thing to do would be to sack Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England because he was too partisan before the referendum. Mark Carney, as far as I can see, is the only thing standing between us and having to wheel our pay home at lunch time in a barrow, and spend it before tea time to cheat devaluation. The only reason the markets rallied on Friday was because he’d stashed £250 billion down the sock drawer and waved it around a bit. It wasn’t because the markets had confidence in us, it was because he showed them the money.

And they are playing at this. None of them are making decisions. None of them are doing anything. Our country is a laughing stock, our economy is in free fall and our government has washed its hands of us in favour of stabbing each other in the back.

I’m glad to say there is no ninthly and tenthly, but at the rate we’re going, there will be by tea time.

I am genuinely gobsmacked by those people who did not see this coming and those who are still clinging to the England will be great again, this is just a temporary blip fantasy. As for the racism, well, It’s the worst thing to come out of this whole sorry mess as far as I’m concerned.

I’m slightly in awe, someone has managed to pretty much sum up the way I’m feeling without sounding like a bitter idiot! I’ve tried and deleted so many posts , I’m usually quite good at reasoned ranting ,but not this time, thank you!

One last point, to anyone spouting about Churchill , just remember he envisioned a day when people would consider themselves a citizen of Europe first but also a citizen of their country of origin.

The typical rock ape who uses this kind of crap hates (and I’m mean really really detests) having their own “hero” disprove the validity of their argument

Ok I agree with you here Katy and I’d also like to say that my reactions to the leave vote winning (although it looks more like losing to me if you get my drift) are a mixture of anger, disappointment but most prominent of all is fear, fear for my future, an 18 year old’s future which from the way the £ is plummeting and how fast the United Kingdom (which doesn’t seem so united anymore) is descending into chaos is looking pretty bleak.

Another note to make is that I will never calm down from this because it was a referendum and not a general election, if it was a general election I’d just bear with it for 5 years till the next election but this; this is done and will never happen again as once we are out we are OUT.

What REALLY scares me is how the other day the EU was saying that Britains decision to leave the EU is not an amicable divorce and wants the negotiations sorted and finished ASAP suggesting that once we finally leave the EU could very well turn around and say that they don’t want to have anything to do with us.

Finally all I can say is that unless the petition for a re-referendum is successful then we’d better spend the next 2 years preparing for some very tough times ahead when we finally leave the EU.

I wish I could disagree with you on any of this Lewis. I’ve apologised to my children for this. My seventeen year old wants to work on organic farms in France next year after A levels. God knows how this is going to pan out. While I’m here I will apologise to you too. I wish we could have done better by each other.

First time I have read this blog – well done for encapsulating the thinking person’s horror at all this so well.

We are only at the start of this cataclysm as you say, so today I was up early to liquidate most of my pension fund (due in 6 months) into cash and was fortunate to have been able to do so by just after 8. It really is every man for himself in what looks likely to be a chaotic disintegrating state over the next few years I fear, especially with small state sociopaths seizing control. They have cut back the police severely so any breakdown in order may be hard to control without resort to the military – remember London a few years ago when a much bigger police force just about held the line?

And all the time the relentless and non-negotiable biophysical events of climate change are ticking – look at the huge rainfall events in West Virginia, Belgium/France/Germany and Japan, the heatwave in India, the melting glaciers and icecaps. And the new Tory boys and kippers are mostly paid up climate deniers you won’t be surprised to hear.

I too have been doing what I can but in a small village with lots of flag waving numbskulls posting pictures of crusader knights and two fingers to Europe on the web it’s hard at times. Collective madness seems to be the order of the day.

No, it is not surprising to hear the climate denying thing sadly. I’ve been aware of how worried parties like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are by what this could mean to them. Collective madness does seem to sum it up. x

Just a couple of corrections: Gove and Boris (the Borogoves?) are both MPs and as such were elected by British voters. The choice of PM is the MPs’ choice but this is also via a voting mechanism. The Queen being wheeled out probably refers to her willingness to divest power to Parliament, but you are correct that the whole Royal Family is unelected (but incorrect in the inference that she somehow rules over us in any practical day-to-day sense).

Yes, I know they were elected MPs, but I guess my point is that generally we elect a party and expect the head of the party we have voted for to stick with us and not bail on us, so we actually voted for a party led by Cameron, not by Gove or Boris or Theresa May. MPs votes, to my mind don’t count as being representative of the country given that they have their own axes to grind and the whips to contend with. I didn’t mean to infer the Queen had any ruling power. It’s just that I’ve met a few people who have directly attributed her return to power and sovereignty as a key part of their desire to vote leave. If I mention Charles I, I am generally met with blank stares!

What about ninth being the farce that was parliament today where the former PM ducked most of the questions put to him saying that the decision would be down to the next PM and they all seemed to be having a jolly good laugh while the country collapses around their ears. I am sure you could write something very eloquent about that.

In case no-one else mentions it – I keep hearing that 52% of the British Public voted to Leave. This is untrue. Considering a percentage of the British Public eligible to vote did not, then only 37.5% of the British Public VOTED to Leave.

A well-written piece. I know you are angry, but you have managed to articulate the reasons in an entertaining but passionate way. I share every one of your opinions (though luckily I chose to live in Australia 45 years ago) but I hope that isn’t the only reason I enjoyed your article.

Awesome summary.
Then (ninthly?) just to cap it all England are bundled out of a rather different European Club, far more swiftly and decisively, by Iceland.
It was, as the French who now play Iceland in the last eight, would say ‘a coup de grâce’.

Absolutely brilliant blog post, thank you so much for articulating what I feel!

On the point of how many people voted

Of the eligible voting population:
– 37.4% voted to leave
– 34.6% voted to remain
– 28% either chose not to vote or were prevented from voting (eg because of delayed postal votes or travel problems on the day).

Of the total population of the UK and Gibraltar, but excluding other overseas voter populations because I couldn’t find figures on them:
– 26.7% voted to leave
– 24.8% voted to remain
– 20% didn’t vote
– 28.5% were ineligible, including children, teens and non-voting immigrants who will be hugely affected by this decision but didn’t get a say in it.

Sheer brilliance….you have taken all the words I want to say and poured them on the page….I applaud you. I wish you hadnt had to say any of this, but you have summed it up and now I must share it on my page. I too cannot speak to friends and family that voted Brexit, I think I may never, ever again wish to speak to them, they made their choice, which is now mine, though I never wanted it. I will have to cut my Brexitfriends free…as we can never be friends again, who can like someone who has ruined their life?

I agree to everything you say….. i tried to have a conversation with a leaver and all he could end with was “we are putting the great back into Great britain”..right i think the rate we are going that will be the little, back in England (or possibly split further come to that “little Devon”).
So we have no plan , no policy, firms threatening to leave (i couldn’t blame them) johnson managing to put out something vague, the meaning of which is ridiculous. And the leavers think they have won- won what exactly.
I am writing a constructive email to my MP, signing petitions (some though are simply not worth it), before we start to really suffer (inflation, recession and those other things that evidently do not seem to matter)- some people are completely oblivious to what is happening, or simply do not care. Some have admitted they wish they had voted differently.
sorry i hope you do not mind, i am so angry and so bewildered at how this could be happening. I am also worried that this power vacuum, with Labour seeming to fall apart as well, is a prime breeding ground for the far right extremists to gain a foot hold, and it scares me too. I will not tolerate this one bit.
They lied in the referendum, think they can just dictate what they want to the EU for trade, ect and get what they want. sorry i just hope i’ll wake up and its all a dream.

Thank you for articulating everything we’ve been thinking and feeling in our household since Friday morning. It’s a relief to know other people feel exactly the same and also that they want to fight on.

Thank you!!! I am also enraged, and found this very helpful to read. I fell off the decency side of things earlier today when I photographed a woman who’d insulted me for wearing an IN badge, then posted it on social media. I think there is a wise balance to be found between feeling one’s anger, and taking informed action, and becoming intolerant oneself. So much wishing to stand for tolerance and well-informed argument. Fight on! I’m doing what I can too.

Thank you. This is what I have been churning around in my head. I thought I would have calmed down now, and although the burning anger has been joined by a strange morbid fascination at the sheer chaos I am primarily still seething. I told my 4 year old not to stamp his feet and scream today- but could almost have joined him.

There is not a single thing that you mentioned that I don’t agree with. Having studied EU politics and history for the last 15 years, I am pretty sure the divorce won’t be amicable. They are afraid of the domino effect and they will try to play as hard as they can to make Britain a bad example for other eurosceptic countries. And it makes total sense. I mean ok Britain is the biggest economy in the EU but how did politicians think they will get out of it so easily? I am from Greece and I came in the UK two years ago. I know how hard Brussels can play and from what I can see this is only the start of the game… Get prepared for many other interventions from Brussels and other EU leaders about the political situation in the UK, which will, unfortunately, raise the pleasure of Leave voters and possibly the eurosceptics inside the UK. I just hope things will get better..

I voted for Brexit for one reason and one reason only – the persistant. 40 year + democratic deficit that the EU and the keepers of the flame of the EU project have deliberately and pointedly never addressed despite numerous opportunities.

Boris will be PM, and it will probably be a disaster, and then we can vote him out of the job. Had Boris got himself appointed as an EU commissioner instead, that would be it, he’d be accountable to nobody, elected by nobody and responsible to nobody but himself.

This year the EU is quite benign and it’s economically beneficial to be in the EU, but the EU is coming unglued, the Euro is economic suicide and at some point sooner or later the commission might not be benign, it might decide that we are Greece and need teaching a lesson…

So yes, there is a rational case for Brexit, but it’s not a this month or even this year thing, it’s long term. Also fixable by fixing the democratic deficit in the EU…

That’s terrific. Because since Friday at a conservative estimate we have lost the equivalent to fifty years worth of EU membership and we’re still going. To even the odds we will have to wait until my daughter is sixty seven years old, and that’s a conservative estimate.

And I’m not daft enough to think that it was going to be fixed overnight, but it’s a stalemate now and we’re hanging on by our fingernails. Every day we wait, every moment our economy tanks we have less to barter with. We are already not the fifth largest trading nation in the world and that happened on Friday.

And now Boris is talking about the EEA as an option. It costs as much as the EU to join. How are we being saved at all?

And given our appalling shower of a government, the democratic deficit is ours.

But is it benign? Ask Greece how benign it is? Let Greece describe what the practical implications of a democratic deficit can be when your unelected emperor decides you now are out of favour. And being shafted by a remote dictatorship that you cannot change isn’t, like a crap government run by convincingly lying muppets, something that you have to endure for 5 years until the next election, it’s forever. Which is quite a while. Or to quote George Orwell, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”. What kind of country would this be now if that incredibly popular Mr Blair who won all those elections by landslides couldn’t have been voted out in 2010, whether or not he had been replaced by Gordon Brown in some internal coup. Imagine if Margaret Thatcher couldn’t have been voted out when her popularity waned, or if her messianic certainty in the fairness and rectitude of the poll tax hadn’t been tempered by her party’s realisation that it was electoral suicide to continue it. Imagine a world where the Tories were never wiped out in Scotland for test running the poll tax up there, because there were no elections to change the leadership there.

That’s the EU as presently put together. And people have complained about this for 40 years, even as the EU has gathered more power to itself and broadened its reach repeatedly, and yet the problem has never been fixed, the deckchairs have been rearranged a couple of times, but the EU now has a president with real power and influence who came to power through a process that Kim Il Jong would recognise. Europe is currently engaging with and granting concessions to Erdogan, the man who has effectively wiped out and imprisoned the free press in Turkey, for tactical advantage via its ‘independent foreign policy’. Are you still happy that the EU is the guarantor of your human rights? What can you do about it if you aren’t?

The only reason there isn’t a Europe wide democratic presidential election (for example) is because the people with the real power in the EU do not want there to be, because increasing the power of the european citizenry dilutes or diminishes theirs.

It’s notable that the initial reaction in France to Brexit was ‘Let us hold an emergency summit of the founder nations to see if we can make the EU more democratically accountable’, because France has its Le Pen problem and there is a real risk of Frexit for much the same reasons, over many of the same issues that caused BrExit. Very quickly after, the Germans made it very clear that there would be no negotiations, no reform and that the English would be punished for daring to leave to encourage the others not to be so foolish. Of course proper democratic reform of the EU would help stop Frexit in its tracks, and Xexit, and the looming risk of Itexit, it might even give those suffering buyers remorse over Brexit a real justification and cover for a second referendum, Can you think of a reason why the Germans might be so keen to nip all discussion of it in the bud before it gets started? If you can think of such a reason, that reason is also reason enough to want out of the EU, however bad the short term pain it causes.

My reply goes to @Silicon Implant rather than you David since he/she mentioned Greece in his/her answer.

Well yes Greece suffers from the EU austerity measures, but has its own responsibility about the austerity measures imposed to the country. For the last 6 years, politicians sign memoranda and instead of making the reforms that are needed, they instead cut wages and pensions and raise taxes. Moreover, Greece is a member of the eurozone. Yes euro was a curency that was created only for the good times, without taking into consideration that bad times/recession will come. Euro constructions was ill founded, and Greece was only the first victim of the eurozone. Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Ireland, Italy followed.

If the EU has reacted more quickly on the first year, maybe things would have been better for Greece. Maybe the rest of the countries wouldn’t have faced a similar crisis. So please do not use Greece as an example to show how undemocratic EU is as you miss many pieces of the story. On the day of the BBC debate, I heard Greece being mentioned at least 3 times by the Leave campaign. Twitter was full of people mentioning why Greece entered the EU with false statistics. Well, I had to defend my country and specify that it did enter with wrong statistics but it was the Eurozone, not the EU. We entered the EU in 1981. At the end of the day, yes, the EU has a democratic deficit but even if you see EU as an enemy, it’s better to fight the enemy from inside with its own weapons.

Closing, if it wasn’t for the EU, I wouldn’t have been in the UK. Neither as an Erasmus student in Norwich back 13 years ago, nor as an employee in London under the Erasmus placement programme 2 years ago. Have a great week ahead!

There seems to be a depressing lack of a clear plan to get out of this mess – I have one. Prosecute Johnson, Farage and Gove for electoral fraud (as per Alistair Carmichael) on the basis of misleading the electorate. Declare the Referendum result null and void, and have another vote.
Meanwhile, ennoble Mark Carney – who is the one person who has emerged with any credit – and get him on the Front Bench. He is the only person with a clue what to do.
We probably need a wartime-style coalition to take charge.
I share your fury – I am heart sick at how the whole political class has decimated the life chances of the next generation through incompetence and wishful thinking.
Hamish

Brilliant article, posted on FB by a friend of mine. I don’t blame Cameron for leaving it to Boris. Cameron wanted to Remain. He can hardly be expected to get a good Brexit deal, and would take the blame for a bad one. As the deal is going to be either bad or worse, it’s only fair Boris cops the blame for the outcome. If you are looking for a ninth point, can I suggest the popular press, who I believe (I’m a Commonwealth observer of this disaster) only revealed the inevitable negative outcomes AFTER the voting closed. I gather their social media feeds are jammed with comments along the lines of “Now you tell us!”. Finally, is it possible Cameron and the EU are playing a game of brinkmanship, stoking up the public fears over the Brexit to a point where they can reject the result “in the National Interest”?

Excellent rant! Wondering if you have thought of the (possibly) more far-reaching results: GB breaks up (becoming ineffectual ally); Trump gets elected (not Brexit, but an essential aspect in this future apocalyptic scenario – think NATO); Russia stops rubbing its hands in glee and starts invading; WW3 erupts; refugees flood England. Can you tell I live in Eastern Europe?

Wow… i’ve been saying the same thing all weekend. You just put my words in print.
What i do not understand is WHY do the current politicians seem more focused on their infighting than on trying to save the country from disaster.

Absolutely brilliant. Sadly you’ve managed to portray exactly the sense of despair and disbelief I’ve been feeling since Friday. I wish this would pass but I know it won’t for a very long time. Best wishes.

I don’t know you. Someone shared this on Facebook. It says everything I wanted to. Absolutely bloody marvelous. I will be quoting you a lot, particularly to people telling me to ‘calm down, get on with it, accept a democratic decision’ etc and bloody so forth. Thank you.

Thank you Katy, you sum up my feelings perfectly. Will ‘they’ please stop saying the UK voted to leave, we didn’t, I didn’t. I think your ninthly and so on could be well directed at those leave voters now saying they didn’t want to leave but… and the guy who started the 2nd referendum petition, now with 3m+ signatures, who was actually a leave campaigner who was preparing for a remain vote and is now ‘very angry’ – join the club.

You have articulated your anger beautifully. The process I am in is grief at a loss, like the death of a close friend: we will eventually reconcile ourselves to the loss, but never lose that inner sadness. Thank you.

I’m up for supporting a class action against Boris, Gove, Farage and the others who chose to use blatant lies to woo the public with visions of a land of milk and honey.
Thank you for writing this …. You articulate it brilliantly, I just wish you hadn’t needed to.

A brilliant piece. Can I just add that you should perhaps withdraw a little bit of your anger from (ex) Shadow Cabinet members resigning en masse from Corbyn? They are doing so because Corbyn pretty much single-handedly delivered the Brexit result. They are on your side.

Both Chris Bryant and Alan Johnson claimed yesterday that Corbyn’s office repeatedly intervened with the “Labour In” campaign. Finally, yesterday afternoon, Corbyn’s office confirmed this. Corbyn felt their proposed (unused) campaign was “too euphoric” about the EU. He would only back a campaign which was “balanced”, i.e. one which was critical of the EU and called for reform. In short, one that pushed his personal agenda.

Corbyn made no attempts, ever, to rein in the Labour Leave campaign run by Gisela Stuart. No “balance” there!

Corbyn spent most of the referendum “campaigning” to small audiences in out of the way places where he was unlikely to affect the decision in any meaningful way – for example, he spent the penultimate weekend of the campaign in Scotland, where a remain vote was always assured, and where Labour was dead in the water anyway. He refused to share a platform with any Tory remain campaigner. Most of his speeches were not about the EU, but about the need to register to vote: laudable, maybe. But something which would also benefit the Labour party for the future.

Corbyn refused to answer a direct question from Chris Bryant as to how he voted. Why? Unless he voted leave? His brother, Piers Corbyn, believes he voted leave.

That is why the (ex) Shadow Cabinet are now trying to bring down Corbyn. He has acted dishonourably, and forfeits the right to lead the party.

Thank you so much for this Katy. I have been incoherent with rage at what I’ve seen unfold over the past days and am deeply afraid of what I see unfolding in times ahead. Your blog says exactly what I would like to say to people when I hear all their ‘buck up, it’s democracy’ nonsense. So again, thank you!
I’m Irish, so Brexit will not cost me my EU citizenship and my right to be part of a noble and brave project – probably the most noble and brave in history (albeit flawed and very human in many ways – and fixable!). However, my daughter does lose hers, as she is British and is unable to obtain Irish Citizenship. So my grief for her, over the loss of the opportunities that the EU offers, is profound. And for all the young people in the UK who can no longer be part of Europe and my dear English, Welsh and Northern Irish friends. Mostly, because I was actually born in South Africa and spent all my youth fighting apartheid and fascism in my country of birth, much of it in exile, I feel broken-hearted at the vile xenophobic and racist actions that some of the leavers are now indulging in across the UK.
Please keep writing and speaking out.

Thank you for articulating all my anger and frustration so perfectly. Reading this has been like taking a couple of painkillers for a 4 day migraine. The figures as commented above make it all the more incongruous that this has happened. How on earth can such a monumental decision be made when nearly half of those who voted said remain anyway??? For something like this we need a clear majority and, as is becoming woefully obvious as lacking, a plan.

I also saw this shared on Facebook. You’ve perfectly captured my feelings. No, I can’t “get over it”; it’s not like I just lost the vote on which movie we see tonight, I feel that we’re imploding and may take the EU with us.

I don’t actually blame Cameron for walking. Although he lead us to the referendum, this isn’t what he wanted and those politicians who did need to man up and sort it out.

I fear the riots to come. At present I don’t know who that’ll comprise but that depends on what the politicians do next.

Absolutely brilliant. I have felt totally enraged since I heard the result. My Vote Out “friends” have said we won you lost now shut up and that the petitions flying around are all just “bad losers”. Only 37% of UK voters voted to Leave I don’t call that a majority. Oh….don’t get me started. Just really impressed that you have managed to write my views and that I am not the only one out there screaming at the TV. I now live in France and nobody has actually given us any real assurances about what happens to us now so feeling pretty sick and worried. All the French I have spoken to have been very supportive, they are not acting like those in the UK and treating us like unwanted immigrants.

Thank you,you spoke for me and all our family.As someone who has been shouting out loud since Friday morning that this is not a done deal ,what do we do now? In all my 73 years Inhave never felt so angry or despairing.What can we do ,please?

How interesting to read the comments of a group of people who are clearly the fount of all knowledge, who are the only people to understand the issues of Brexit who label 17+ million people fuckwits but don’t understand the difference between ‘could’ and ‘would’ when misinterpreting the statement ‘could be used for the NHS’ as a promise. The pitiful cry of ‘We are on our own now’ without the crutch of the vastly corrupt EU also applies to 170ish other countries in the world, many of who have managed very well indeed without that crutch. It seems to me to be the cries from terrified Little Europeans rather than Independent internationalist Britons who are not afraid to stand on their own two feet.

How interesting to read the comments of a man who believes we are now free even though we are heading into an EEA agreement which gives us less power than before, still insists on freedom of movement over borders, and leaves us at the mercy of the EU laws that you don’t want, and yet costs us exactly the same. How interesting that you still believe that even though we are not now the fifth largest trading entity in the world and 45% of our trade comes from Europe, that we are in a position of power and liberation. Liberation from what? How interesting to read the remarks of someone who ignores the myriad evidence of the direct promises to pour money into the NHS, to deal with immigration that weren’t just a ‘should’. How interesting to read the comments of a man who cannot understand that the leave campaign promised to pour £111 billion pounds per year from a country that is £1.6 trillion in debt and rising at a rate of £5k per second, into the UK and who have no authority or money to do either. How interesting to hear the comments of a man who doesn’t take into account that we have already lost, since Friday 50 years worth of EU entry money, most of it from the annuities market which means your pensions are worth jack shit, and which has already plunged the construction market into recession in one day. How interesting you are that you are still refusing to believe evidence in the face of your jingoistic lies. Oh wait. You’re not interesting at all. Just deluded. Grow up.

I agree with all you say but I am in the fortunate position of living in Scotland and being VERY greatful that we have Nicola Sturgeon fighting for us. She has proved over and over again that she is the most effective politician in Britain. God help Little England, you’ll need all the help you can get!

Exactly my thoughts, especially the bit about the referendum being binding, which, if I mention, I’m accused of being a bad loser. You didn’t mention the fact that it looks like the end of Great Britain too. One day of voting may have broken up relationships with other countries maintained for centuries. And who can blame them.

Thankyou for articulating everything I have felt but have been unable to articulate with any cohesion due to the fact everytime I try my blood boils and I want to punch someone. I can now point to this article and say ‘read that’ for your own protection! Thankyou Katy you have probably saved me from the inevitable public arrest :O) x

This expresses it all for me perfectly. I will share it but I know the only people likely to read it are the Remainers on my FB friends list who have gone underground, fed up of being told – or seeing me be told – to calm down & just ‘deal with it’ and that my fears are irrational, it will all settle down and come out in the wash. They don’t know and they Dont Want to Know. They want to keep their head in the sand believing it will somehow sort itself out – their ‘job’ is done now apparently and it’s time for us all to leave it to the proper people in power to negotiate over a nice cuppa. Yeah those ‘proper’ people – who led us to this disaffected state in the 1st place, continue to lie and are jumping like flies from from a steaming shit..

I share your feelings. Never before in my life have I gone to bed angry, awoken in the night angry, and got out of bed in the morning so ANGRY for days on end. Oh, and then at the same time feeling huge waves of sadness. You have articulated beautifully the suffocating reality for many of us.

You have put it so brilliantly. The saddest thing is that we were doing ok when we decided to commit this collective suicide as a country, though there was some very serious problems to solve globally. While we now spend every hour, every ounce of political effort and every penny sorting out the mess the British people have plunged us all in as a country, thousands of refugees will die, climate change will to untackled, poverty will raise, xenophobia and racism will also raise, and global instability will grow. And even worse, it has put project Europe in jeopardy which for me as a European leaving and working in England for 28 years is the saddest thing I have witnessed. I loved this country greatly for the welcomeness, openness and inclusion it showed to all cultures. I have a different feeling at the moment every time I go out. What a terrible outcome at every level! And after 28 years of being a tax payer and contributor to this society, I did not even get a vote. Who said this was democracy?

Thank you thank you thank you! You have so eloquently put exactly what I am feeling. I got verbally abused in the street by a couple of leave campaigners before the vote. I won’t go into detail but it was personal and it was nasty. I too have been horrified by the hate that is spewing out and I too am devastated and worried about the future. I am clinging to the hope that it is only advisory and we can all write to our MPs to put pressure on them and that no one will actually dare to invoke article 50. Hope springs eternal….

Very well said. The ‘sour grapes’, ‘bad loser’, ‘you lost, get over it’ comments have infuriated me. This is not a game. I have seen many elections come and go, many of which did not go the way I wanted, and I have accepted the result (albeit grudgingly at times) but this is a completely different level of magnitude. I’m not going to sit quietly in the back of the boat as it heads towards the waterfall.

Yes. Exactly. I didn’t get my way in the last general election but was magnanimous about it. This is a whole different level. I don’t think many people realise how momentous this vote is and how much it will affect us all.

Like everyone else here, I would like to say thanks for being so articulate. Things appear to be in free fall with no leadership. Isn’t it terrifying how quickly our once stable nation has been turned upside down? The racist outpourings being reported are worrying – most of all that people think they now have licence to give voice to these totally unacceptable views in so public a fashion.

to the one person who has said “I am happy” can you please follow katyboo1’s lead and explain why you are happy, then go on to explain what taking back our country really means now that you know all of the foreigners aren’t going to be kicked out, and more are going to arrive. The EU aren’t going to roll over and let the UK trade in the EU for free. The NHS isn’t going to be saved by the people who want to privatise it. I still haven’t heard one valid truthful reason for anyone to be happy about it. They have screwed over the country playing petty politics and none of them deserve the right to sit in Parliament.

Dear Katy, this is the best, most well articulated summary of how many of us feel and will continue to feel, it brought back the tears to my eyes which have never been far away since Friday. I am 66 and a passionate European. Until this, I thought that the Iraq war was the worst political crisis of my lifetime. Actually, this is perhaps even worse. Sharing on FB. Keep writing

Very, very, very well said. Thank you for writing – and thank you for articulating – all of the above. I am with you all the way. No more words at the moment – am I just as bereft as you, and so many other millions of people. What have they done?

I voted Remain and agree with you about the consequences of Brexit, but just a point about who is to blame. We’re being told that it’s the fault of the oldies, who mostly voted out, but a huge number of the young didn’t bother to vote at all and since the young are mostly In voters, they would almost certainly have changed the result, so I think as much anger should be directed at them as with the Brexiteers.

The only mistake in this article was the rant about Cameron being elected and that the successor won’t be! You have parliamentarian rule in the UK, which means you elect a party not a leader! The leader is chosen by the elected party! Not the electorate! The reason for this is because the leader has no executive or legislative power whatsoever, unlike a president in countries run by presidential rule (Eg France, US, most of Latin America)! The prime minister cannot do anything without the backing of the government and the leading party, hence he is only a figure head and not elected! There is no need for him to be elected as he cannot make any decision on his own. Otherwise I agree with it all!

I know that Louise, but my point kind of is that when you vote in a general election for a party, they are represented in people’s minds by the leader of that party and it feels like Cameron should be doing this. He got elected in on the promise of a referendum which united his split party. He needs to deal with it. I know he won’t and as a remain supporter I can see why he is wanting to pass the buck here, but it still chafes.

YES! When you make a horrible mistake that has dire consequences you don’t just sweep it under the carpet and skip into the sunset you take action to put it right. I’m also very alarmed to see the UK imploding but I think there IS a plan and that plan (I hope) is never to invoke Article 50 because after 3 months of economic pain while waiting for soneone mad enough to pull that trigger the Leave voters who aren’t already regretting their decision will be and they’ll accept the eventual U-turn and that staying in is best.

It’s the first time I’ve read your blog. Thank you for your excellent analysis of what’s happened and why people like me are in shock and grieving. I’m in my early sixties and am horrified that my contemporaries have screwed over the young people of this country yet again. The outpouring of racist bile in the last few days has been horrifying. I’m ashamed to be British. I want MY country back.

Thank you for writing such thought provoking pieces. My partner is Jewish. What scares me is that we are seeing a rise in nationalism. We take our eye of that ball at our extreme peril. I listened to the radio the other day as the DJ declared :”That after Hitler seized power . . .” Hmm I seem to recall that he was democratically elected on the basis of bringing power and greatness back to the Germany after the reparations imposed by The League of Nations following WW1 had broken the will of the nation. Germans were not intrinsically bad but just ordinary people lead astray by a charismatic orator.

Thank you so much Katy. You have said so much of what I feel, the only difference is that I wouldn’t have used the (few) swearwords you did as it’s not my way. I have had a friend suggest “enough is enough” when I posted yet another comment on the referendum. Nobody has actually abused me for my position – I am too old & thick skinned for it to make any difference to me, being nearly 70!
My one hope, which comes from by strong Christian faith, is that God truly IS in control and he can make something wonderful out of this appalling mess. There may indeed be a silver lining, but it doesn’t make the awful journey we will have to endure to get there any less painful.
I find it particularly distasteful that the Far Right have taken this vote as permission to come out of the woodwork and suggest to anybody who doesn’t look pure white Anglo-Saxon that thety shoud go back to where they come from. It has indeed opened a Pandora’s Box which won’t be easy to close.
Please keep on blogging. You speak for many of us who are less articulate.

As I see it, the most invidious step of the last 24 hours has been Cameron’s bland assertion that the “decision” must be respected.

There are two things wrong with this.

1. The referendum was advisory, and not mandatory. The decision is with parliament, a fact that is becoming more widely appreciated.
2. There’s no “must” here. Parliament must assert its sovereignty (remember that word anyone) and mage that decision, asap, for the benefit of the country.

Vide Geoffrey Robertson’s piece in the Guardian. I also wrote a piece for Liberal Democrat Voice (readership 10).

A week ago, Brexit was wrong for the UK. The Leave campaign turned this into a plebiscite about discontent and won that. They dissed the ergonomic experts of the world. They were wrong. Mark Carney s right. It is still wrong for the UK. It has to be stopped.

As you say there is no leadership here. How can we create it? #stopBrexit.

Thanks like all who have commented you are expressing what we all feel – but collectively we don’t know what to do now – is all we can do just writing to our MP or collectively can we do more ? How do we encourage the leave voters to come out of hiding and admit they were wrong and get them to start demanding a 2nd chance to correct this mess they’ve opened the door to.

“As I see it, the most invidious step of the last 24 hours has been Cameron’s bland assertion that the “decision” must be respected.”

We are still at the stage where party-political manoeuvring matters to Cameron. He wants a way to escape the situation without having to press the button himself – he needs BoJo to own it and find a way to do it without seeing the Tory vote defect to UKIP. Farage is already gearing up for action with photo-ops about betrayal on the fields of the Somme.

If we move into the “everything’s on fire” stage before Article 50 or the EU finds a pretext for ejection, this is likely to change.

I also don’t know who you are, but again, brilliant and exactly how we (my wife and me) are feeling. Did you see the Italians are now being forced to ask for a bailout because of the contagion effect? They’ve said the UK sneezed, and we caught a cold… Where will it end…

Being an Italian who lived in the UK and now in Spain, I can tell you that if there was a similar referendum in Italy right now, the “leave” side would win by a very, very long shot. At least reading all my Italian peers’ face book posts, various articles online, etc.

Reasons why? As in the UK, for immigration issues (in the end of the day all the immigrants arrive first in Southern Europe – Greece and Italy), for the Euro currency that literally ruined the country (I was in Italy when the change happened, and although €1 = ₤1,936.27, everything within a couple of months became €1 = ₤1,000, or, in other words, everything doubled its price, but the wages obviously didn’t. Luckily the UK never wanted the Euro), because of impositions from the EU regarding the taxation (in the last few years many people have taken their lives because they couldn’t cope any more with the ever‑increasing taxes)…
Poor buggers – yes, I totally agree…
In Italy they would surely vote out, and… nothing of what they would expect to change would change anyway.

What I mean is that the other big trouble is that the UK vote triggered now a mechanism all over Europe where ignorant people can see that it can be done, and now want to be “independent” too.

Really spot on article anyway; and, if it makes you feel better, you Brits are seen pretty much as heroes in Italy right now.

Thank you for articulating so eloquently what me and millions of others are feeling right now. And I agree, I will not shut up, the fight for democracy is just beginning. Hope you don’t mind me sharing this, people need to read it.

Brilliantly put, saying everything I feel. I echo all that #Jane above has said and I am 70. I feel sick for the future for all our children and our grandchildren. Thank you for articulating all that I feel.

Great piece Katy. I’m so sorry fo all the English who have either been duped or stuck with a horrendous situation which started after the Tories “won” the election. We at least in Scotland have a party who stands for the people and a leader hell bent on removing us from the craziness. We are hoping for Independence as we have no voice at all in England. Even our elected MPs are told they are not allowed to vote on certain “English” issues. This is NOT a democracy its a plutocracy and appears to be heading towards a right wing dictatorship. God helps us all. Like I said at least we have some hope in Scotland. Good luck to all the 4 nations of this Union because were going to need something to keep us going.

Well Said Katy … My ninthly would be Equality and Diversity and as the Facists rely on the uneducated for their troops I expect a rise in hate crime towards LGBT and myself as a transgender person who is out in the world will have to bear the brunt. Some of my Trans friends who are not “out” will put on their males clothes fall in line with their mates down the pub and go f you lot !
Incandescent is not the only thing I’m feeling …
Paula X

Well said – totally agree – I think you capture the feelings of 49% of the nation while the other 51% are too busy feeling smug that they have ‘saved the U.K.’ – by this time next year the uk as we know it may not even exist. Thanks folks, happy now?

I agree with almost all of this, except your opinion that Cameron leaving is a bad thing. His leaving behind a poison chalice is the sole reason article 50 hasn’t been activated.

Boris doesn’t want it, Farage has been distanced by the leave side, Nicola Sturgeon is doing her best to fight for Britain’s best interests, and there’s international condemnation for Brexit.

Hopefully the government will dismiss this racist, xenophobic – and as you said, advisory – decision so we can return to being British; polite, accepting, friendly… traits which are already very representative in Scotland & Ireland, and to a lesser degree – Wales. Bitter English patriotism and elitism better represents the swathes of leave voters. I just hope it’s not representative of the country as a whole.

Perfectly put. This truly does say just how I feel. I haven’t quite made as far as you have in trying to pull some practicals out of this – I would join a political party but I’m not sure which one can best fight this. I am utterly disgusted at Labour basically copping out. I don’t care what you think of your leader at – at this point, you plant a rictus grin of disgust on your face and you pretend you’re united and you get out there and you hold the muppets responsible for this shoddy mess to account. I will look into electoral reform – that might be somewhere where I can find a practical place to release the hot ball of anger I have been carrying around with me since Friday. Thank you for articulating what so many of us remain voters feel. (Oh – and I second knighting Mark Carney – and I know the world’s tipped upside down when I think this about a banker!)

Thank you for this. Well done.
“Democracy is part of a process and is happening all the time. I have the democratic right to fight against decisions made on my behalf that I don’t like, and I don’t like this one, so I am fighting it every step of the way. Do not throw the word democracy in my face. It is not a trump card.” Exactly – just as Farage did. And now watch him take away anyone else’s right to do the same thing. There will be new draconian laws – to “protect” us – and before you know it we will have absolutely no freedom to do anything.

Anger is a force. Anger is energy. We are going to need that energy and we need to stop wasting it on wishing this hadn’t happened and shouting at the people who were convinced by some pretty slick liars.

Here are some words for you to use to make it easy as a cut and paste, or simply write your own message.

You can take the opportunity to go into more detail if you choose to – this will be an important way for MPs to read the mood of the nation.

———————————————————————————-
I would like to ask you on my behalf and as my elected representative in Parliament, to work in every way possible to overturn the result of the recent EU Referendum, so that the UK is able to stay in the EU.
———————————————————————————-

In addition to writing to your MP, you can also write to other MPs and ministers on that list – either by email or by letter.

In just two days, our currency has been massively undermined, our companies have lost more value than the EU cost us in 15 years, our credit rating has been downgraded, which will immediately undermine the money available for public services (which are already under pressure from the lingering impact of the global recession), we are leaderless, some Leave voters are carrying out racist attacks, migrants who live here and contribute to our economy are scared, good people are planning to emigrate, our momentum is stalling and we have no plan.

This is not a good way to run a stable, prosperous and healthy society.

Perhaps there might be a way in which we might exist happily outside the EU, I have no idea – but THIS IS NOT IT – our leaders have failed us by lack of planning and our only option now is to go into reverse and then take the time to reconsider.

If you are heading in the wrong direction, you should never be too proud or too stubborn to turn back.

Whilst I agree with all your sentiments there is another 52% of the population who are going to be even more upset if leaving doesn’t go ahead, so Britain is between a rock and a hard place right now. Britain needs to work together right now to get through this and they need to forget all the scaremongering of the entire campaign. The World is not going to stop trading with Britain; Europe is not going to stop trading with Britain as they need Britain just as much as Britain needs them (unless all BMW, Audi, Mercedes and VW drivers all trade in their cars for Jaguars, Bentleys, Fords and Vauxalls – sorry not those, they have German connections). The World’s 5th largest economy is not going to implode – if it does it will drag the rest of the World with it and the rest of the World is sensible enough not to allow that to happen. The pound will recover as the banks and hedge funds who bet on Brexit devaluing the pound start scrambling to reap the rewards of their ill-gotten gains.

At the moment the people who are set to gain the most from the “doom and gloom” predictions are doing nothing to try and allay those fears, because they have nothing to gain from doing so and they continue to perpetuate the lies and scaremongering they spread during the campaign. Both sides lied through their back teeth and none of them are going to own up to lying, just making mistakes. Why did neither side say exactly how much the UK puts into the EU and compare that amount to the other nations’ contribution? Why did neither side say exactly how much Britain gets back from the EU or show where the disparity goes (propping up the failing economies of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and France)? Think about all the people who said “Remain” and how much they had to lose personally, not how much Britain had to lose, just them personally.

On the Leave side, Nigel Farage was to stupid to realise he was committing political suicide as his party has no focus and no standing any more. BoJo doesn’t realise he won’t make it as Tory leader as there are too many Remain politicians who will block his leadership bid. The same goes for Gove whom many politicians will remember his complete ineptitude at running two ministries as well as those who want to punish him for his Leave campaign.

George, I appreciate what you’re saying, but I think your reason is flawed. 52% of the population did not vote to leave. 37% of those that voted did, and to say that over half the country agrees with leave is nonsense. Furthermore it is becoming increasingly apparent that many leave voters didn’t think leave meant what it did.

We are no longer the world’s fifth largest economy. We are sixth. We were sixth by Friday lunch time. And we are still dropping. Being downgraded by Moody’s really caps it. I realise that the economy will rally at some point, but it’s not going to be soon, and with every day of inertia that passes we get weaker. Nobody ‘needs’ us. They needed us when we were part of something bigger and were strong.

Spangled Rabbit posted a comment earlier on this. It’s great: On the point of how many people voted

Of the eligible voting population:
– 37.4% voted to leave
– 34.6% voted to remain
– 28% either chose not to vote or were prevented from voting (eg because of delayed postal votes or travel problems on the day).

Of the total population of the UK and Gibraltar, but excluding other overseas voter populations because I couldn’t find figures on them:
– 26.7% voted to leave
– 24.8% voted to remain
– 20% didn’t vote
– 28.5% were ineligible, including children, teens and non-voting immigrants who will be hugely affected by this decision but didn’t get a say in it.

Whinge whinge whinge. Please stop whining. The Remainers are the worst doomsayers. Why do you want to Remain? Nearly all the folk I asked were only interested in themselves, not the nation.

The EU is a corrupt warped organisation whose rules are there to satisfy the few. The French mostly.
Has the,world,stopped turning? Have you stopped breathing? Put it into perspective. A plan? It’s simple. Invoke,article 50. Negotiate with every country regarding trade. All those that want to leave, they’ll be back.

We have survived worse. At this time we need less moaning and negativity and a much more positive outlook. There is a whole world out there waiting for our call. Opportunity knocks. The EU is not the only show in town.

If the EU is so wonderful, tell me why Greece is skint. Why there are record levels of youth unemployment and debt? An organisation drowning in red tape. Jobs for the boys. Corruption on untold scales. But you want us to stay. Why? You will be proved wrong but it will take time. Meanwhile you need to get your political party sorted.

Being angry and stating facts is not whinging. Yet again, you are a leaver with no facts to back up anything you say. You do realise that if we invoke article fifty we are still locked into the EU for the next two years and still paying for it? You do realise that we are moving towards EEA which costs the same, insists on freedom of border movement and yet denies us a veto. You do realise we need them more than ever because 45% of our trade is with Europe, we are falling down the rankings of world trading powers already, what was our £1.6 trillion deficit is currently ticking up by £5,000 per second and your decision has cost us 50 years in EU membership already? You do realise that this is merely a reaction to what might happen if we do trigger article fifty? So god knows what will happen when we do. You do realise that we have been downgraded by Moodys which means that we have less for public spending despite leave having pledged, on record to invest £111 billion per year into the UK economy to achieve this magical stuff you think is just going to happen. You do realise it takes 28 months on average to negotiate one single trade agreement and as time ticks by we get weaker and weaker and have nothing to use as leverage? You do realise that Greece is in the shit because, like the UK it has sovereignty and so its problems were its own, just like all the things you blame Brussels for are our own, made for us by an austerity government? NO. You don’t realise do you. You don’t realise at all, and that’s why we’re in this mess.

I think Katy has shot your fox Stephen, comments like yours are one of the main reasons we are all so angry. Were you aware of the list of points Katy makes in her reply above? Particularly that in order to remain a part of the single market we are likely to have to agree to free movement of people?

Three major pillars of the leave campaign have now been debunked within days of the result being announced:

a) The leave campaign now say they cannot guarantee a reduction in immigration – oh dear, but I can’t imagine any leavers cast their vote on this basis right?

b) The leave campaign cannot guarantee the ‘350 million a week saving’ (inverted commas as we all know by now this figure is a fallacy) will be spent on the NHS. Namely because the catastrophic effect of leaving the EU on our economy will far exceed any saving we make on contributions to the EU budget, so we’ll have less to spend on public services than before – the economists told us this before the vote but hey, to quote Gove: “we’ve all had enough of experts” right?

c) The economy will be fine, it’s all scaremongering. Wrong, the economy is not fine and shocker, exactly what was predicted would happen, is happening and we haven’t even left yet..

Finally can I address the point you raise about remain voters only looking out for themselves – From a personal standpoint I’m stunned and angry on behalf of the country, I think you’ll find that sentiment reflected with most remain campaigners. We have chosen collectively as a country to ignore the advice of 95% of economists and leave the EU. The saddest part is that those who are most disadvantaged in this country are those who stand to lose the most from Brexit, so please don’t insult us by claiming our anger is selfishly motivated.

Yep, I echo all that everyone has said – and of course this post! I can feel your anger coming through and I like that -I like your passion so bloody well said! I do agree with Steve above though, Cameron needed to leave because he doesn’t think we did the right thing and he campaigned so hard to stay. It is a poisoned chalice, it’s political suicide to trigger the Article 50 so Boris may have a smile now, and if he does get in, if he does trigger it, his days are numbered – maybe he doesn’t care about that, maybe he just wants a couple of years in the Big Boy’s chair and have 2 minutes of fame. Who knows …. but that is exactly the point you and everyone else who wishes to remain are making …. WHO KNOWS??!!!

I feel as if we have just decided to go ‘ off-roading ‘ in a Chelsea tractor thinking it is some kind of Challenger tank, to take on the rough terrain of the wilds rather than contend with any number of traffic lights and one way systems which hold things up, and don’t even mention the traffic jams . . .

Thank you for this piece, it is exactly how I feel. I am angry, sad, and filled with despair at what has happened and what has been lost. I have unfortunately not been as eloquent as you either, and must confess I have probably alienated some friends and family these last few days due to a few choice words I shared last Friday. But I don’t really care – I want people to know how angry I am. This situation is not okay – and it is not something we can just ‘get over’ in a few days. I want to join a political party but just don’t know which one is the best choice to actually take action on all of this – us angry liberals do need to act now, complacency has gone on too long and is partly the cause of where we are now. But which one?!!?!?!?!?!?!?

Clegg has done a good job of calling this to be fair. He might be in a good position right now if he can just show the strength. I say that as a member of the Women’s Equality Party and the Labour party, just so you know I’m not partisan! x

Thank you for writing exactly how I am feeling. I just can’t imagine a future where the UK feels like a home again. Little things sadden me, like walking around a supermarket yesterday wondering whether the man buying cheese or the lady getting her cereal, were part of this. I don’t like being so distrustful. As a previous writer commented, Mark Carney seems to be a good guy at the moment – a banker! a good guy!
I’m hoping that someone somewhere will stop the rise of the extreme right. I don’t think this will be immediate. I find myself feeling desperately sad that we have stepped so far back from being the welcome and tolerant nation we were.

My city is one of diversity. I live in Leicester. Only last month there were journalists lauding our tolerance and showing our city off as a model of integration. Yesterday someone told me that their friend was pelted with bananas and racist abuse, dropping his children off at a primary school down the road. It makes me weep.

Exactly how I feel. I hoped I’d start to feel a bit better after a few days, I just feel worse, and the idiots in the Labour Party using this as an excuse to start a coup have seriously diminished my one hope of one good thing to come.

We were speaking about the vote and I explained that I had flown over especially to England to vote Remain (I live in Amsterdam) because this was such an important moment in our history.

I asked her how she voted and could scarcely believe what she said:

ME: so how did you vote?
HER: I voted for Exit
ME: oh really, why?
HER: For the Queen
ME: and how do you think the Queen would feel if her Kingdom were torn in two and the Union is broken with Scotland?
HER: oh, she’d be devastated.

The trouble is that it is difficult to see what to do next when grieving. Some I know voted leave though the vast majority either lied or voted remain, I believe the latter.

I think it is important not to go down the route of accusing as some have done, everyone who voted leave of being a racist, bigot or an as thick as shit Sun reader. The vast majority of them are none of those.

Those of us who voted remain still need to work with those who voted leave even if we do think that they did that as a result of being misled and hurling insults is not a good way of building bridges. If we don’t get around to building those bridges, then we will be handing the country to those who are racist and bigoted and the end result will be far worse! I don’t yet know what I am going to do in the way of building bridges but have at least reached a stage where I can consider it.

Yes. I agree we need to build bridges, but it is hard. I believe we will get there, but the angry, bereaved people must be allowed to articulate it without being shouted down. Letting it out is the only hope of letting it go.

Let’s be like you and sulk because yes you are in this boat with us and we are more than you. So it’s going in our direction and if you don’t like it go live in europe as you obviously like it.

As for the othe trips you write and I don’t know when you wrote it but. The pound is no lower than it’s worst when those rich bankers failed us and has climbed since the other knee jerk idiots did the same As you and suggested there is a hole in this boat.

Let’s look at the facts. If Scotland had gone indipendent when they had the chance then the vote would have been so much more in favour of leave as most of the Scots who don’t even want to be with us voted for remain.

London is full of greedy RICH English and people who’s parents were not the ones who fought for is let’s say. Without being accused of being racist.

Sir you are exactly why we need democracy As I guess you could well be one of those politicians who also only care about themselves.

They say old people voted for leave, and who has lost the most? They have. Thier savings, thier shares, pensions, all took a dive and they srent winging because they have guys and believe innthe possibilities for our country.

You use the word ‘sulk’. I suggest you rethink your terms. How about furious? Because you are trying to swing the facts, the facts mind you, not the lies that you told, to suit yourself. You won. If you care so much, get out there and do your research and find out what you can do to help the country you are so proud of ‘pull together’ I am. What are you doing except shouting at people who are angry because people like you believe the lies. The reason this country is in the shit is because of sovereignty which allowed our country’s government to run an austerity programme which has broken schools, hospitals, care homes and any other valuable public service you care to talk about. Not Brussels. The pound is lower. The pound has been sinking steadily for four months, which, let me see, is about the amount of time electioneering for the referendum happened. It swung back on Friday because Mark Carney insisted on ring fencing £250 billion pounds of our money to prop up failing banks, not because people ‘believe’ in leave. Yesterday, what the government lost in RBS shares wiped out 15 years worth of EU membership in two hours. Tell me how the leave party were going to live up to their promise of £111 billion pounds in investment in the UK every year when we were £1.6 trillion in debt on Thursday and we are now adding to that at a rate of £5k per second. That panic you’re talking about that is so ‘unpatriotic’ it isn’t from us, it’s from World markets who have far more grasp of what your precious ‘leave’ vote means than you do. It isn’t rich Londoners. I’m not rich. I don’t come from London. I’m not even a ‘sir’. And shut up about democracy. You literally do not have any idea what it means. And as for old people losing their pensions. That’s not the fault of the remain voters. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s the money markets. The money markets don’t exist to make Britain great. They don’t owe you anything. They exist to make people rich. And much of the investment is from overseas investors, not British nationals, because believe it or not, we don’t have many rich people who are British living in Britain any more because ‘austerity.’ Stop talking twaddle. This is your responsibility. Take your lumps. Learn the facts and if you’re that bothered, do something. I am.

Excellent, I agree with every word. Sadly could I add a ninthly?
Please stop devaluing government petitions.
But starting hundreds of petitions along the lines of ‘allow XX event to be run again so we win’, you devalue the entire system. Government petitions are about the last hope the electorate has to make the government debate something they are ignoring, and they work. If you devalue them in this way the government will take the option away claiming that they no longer do the job they were intended for.

I am very careful about what petitions I sign. As a grass roots political campaigner I will tell you that most, if not all petitions are a nonsense. They merely give you the right to ask parliament to consider something. Very few have any effect, and if you want to do something you need to get out and about and be politically active. I signed the second referendum petition because I believe we were sold a lie and it should be considered. I was glad I signed it when I realised that the bloke who created it was a leave campaigner. x

What happened to the link to the fast Show sketch ? Anyway, I just added for clarity for anyone who didn’t know what I was talking about. However, I truly believe that sums up this whole mess perfectly.

Still, I will say thank you for putting everything so succinctly. I fact I had already planned to go to my local political party HQ and ask what the blinking heck they think thay are playing at !

The game isn’t done yet but it is only because the nation called the bluff of the politicians, and now Jeremy Hunt wants a piece of the action.
Satire is truly dead. How does Armando Ianucci top that for a storyline in his next creation ?

One thing is now certain and that is if the Conservatives are to grasp the poisoned chalice that is immediately the seat of Prime Minister, a very short-term sacrificial lamb is going to be required.
Whomsoever grasps the referendum result and either runs with or stonewalls it is going to be deeply unpopular with half of the electorate.

It might even be in the Conservatives’ best interests to delay any movement on the referendum until after a brought-forward GE and then to tactically lose it, preferably to a Labour-led coalition, thus avoiding the worst fall out themselves and allowing them the luxury if sniping at the incumbent Government from the wings.

A dangerous ploy nevertheless, as a Labour/SNP coalition, supported by Plaid & possibly the N.I. Unionists could conceivably actually prosper, most likely by ‘making it all go away’ ~ ignoring the advisory referendum, reinflating Sterling and slowly affecting global stocks in a positive manner.

Many thanks for this. I am a UK citizen living and working in France. This expresses exactly how I feel. I may now have to apply for French citizenship so I do not get ejected from the country I have chosen to live in as a previously fully paid up member of the EU. Well done. I have shared to FB.

I don’t know you katyboo1, and I really hope you don’t mind, but I’ve shared a link on my FB page. (If you do mind, I’ll remove it) It sums up exactly how I’m feeling. 17 million people were stitched up good and proper. Members of my family come from, or are spread around, 4 continents of our world. Some of them are now scared to leave their home. I have family posting clearly racist memes deliberately to “wind me up”, “because it’s funny”. My daughter can’t stop crying, my friends retirement plans are up the creek; but we’re “free”!!!! I despair of my fellow countrymen! Thank you. x

I understand your anger, believe me, I have been there ! I have spent 41 years feeling as you feel now !
41 years ago we were conned into a boat. We we’re categorically told that boat was not going where we feared. On the basis of those claims a majority got in the boat and took the rest of the country with them. For 41 years I watched as the course of that boat was changed by stealth and deception to go where I always knew it would go. So anger, yes I can tell you all about anger.
My personal view is that after just 5 days the expression of your anger is pathetic in comparison. I wish you a happy next 41 years.

Your magnanimity and lack of foresight is staggering. Your selfishness also. Your blindness to see the facts is astounding and your willingness to wish harm on others is appalling. I’m glad you have managed to shape into words what you think, because, rather like the lies the leavers peddled, and tried to delete but can’t, the evidence is here. Our country is better than it was because we worked for unity and peace. It is better than it was because we are more prosperous, and the things that we are failing at? Well, they’re all down to austerity government measures brought in by our politicians under their sovereign right to do so, not under EU law. You have voted to isolate yourself with the people who have broken up this country and fed it to greedy dogs, and now they don’t have anyone to stop them. We have lost in four days, over 50 years worth of EU membership fees. Our Moody’s rating has gone down and public spending will suffer. Our housing market is collapsing, our building market is collapsing. There will be no social housing now, and not for a long time in the future either. There will be no hospitals now, and God knows what the 26% of non UK workers in the NHS are going to do. You do realise our government’s brutal policies towards trainee doctors and nurses means that we cannot supply all the staff we need and we are unlikely to do so for years to come, and that was before Friday? Your actions are selfish, short sighted and deluded. Thanks.

So that’s it then, is it? We all book one way flights and leave for brighter shores and leave behind those that can’t keep up? Or do we go back, cap in hand, to the EU and be their whipping boys, made to stand quietly in the corner for eternity? Read plenty of well thought out and written posts on why we’re in such upheaval but nothing on how we can turn this around and find a way to prevail?! All they do is serve the publisher in feeling superior! Do we really lack anyone with any positivity, vision and drive?? If so, we may as well let the place fall into oblivion as there’s nothing worth saving! I don’t mean to have a pop at you but why can’t intellectuals get together and formulate a plan for our path forward?! We had a vote. Leave won. Now let’s deal with it in a democratic and positive way, eh?

Well, Don. That’s what our government is supposed to do, the one we elected to serve the best interests of the public. The one that’s currently ripping itself to bits whilst letting Farage devalue the pound every time he opens his mouth. Are they doing it? No, they fucking aren’t. It’s not up to the people, sadly. We have very limited ways to effect change. Some of us are trying to do our best. Lobby your MP. Join a political party you think might do the job. Go to a rally. Look at the Electoral Reform Society’s mandate. Protest against the destruction of the ECHR while you can. Petition the EU while we are still a part of it. I’ve done all this already. I’m pointing out that our biggest chance for things not to go tits up happened on Thursday and this is the mess we’re in because we took that chance and fucked it. We have to try and influence where we can. I’m doing all these things Dan. I’m not just sitting here moaning. I’m out there. I’m out tonight in fact, at a solidarity rally for my city, trying to reassure people that we can still be united. What are you doing? Except having a pop at people like me, because it’s easy to sit behind a keyboard isn’t it?

Oh so true. I am in complete agreement with you. One thing you did not mention which I am amazed hasn’t been picked up more by the media is that in Doris’s (cant think of him as anything else after the Frank Spencer sketch on Sports Relief) article he actual said “The pound remains higher than it was in 2013 and 2014” Against what???? Yes perhaps the Euro but that fell off the same cliff as the pound. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-27/boris-johnson-future-pm-and-currency-analyst)
He is incapable of being truthful – he was sacked from the Daily Telegraph for filing incorrect reports and from Michael Howards shadow cabinet for lying.
I could perhaps live with this “democratic” result if I felt everyone who had voted actually understood what the consequences were going to be but everyone I have spoken to who voted leave voted on a false premise and a complete lack of understanding.
I have decided I will be writing to my MP to try to convince him to vote against this when he gets the chance. Lets face it every MP in the country was voted in with less than 50% of the constituency vote so its probable that every time they vote they are not voting as the majority of their constituents would wish so this would be no different.

Thanks a lot for this! I am a European living in the UK and I am very worried about stability and peace in Europe. I am worried about my parents in Germany, my family in law in the Netherlands and my friends I’ve met by living in Spain, Greece, studying in Italy and working in the UK and Sweden. And mostly I am worried about my two children’s future being born in Great Britain a country that has just rejected a not flawless but beautiful concept of peace.

I just read all of your post, And my conclusion is you are just spouting the same bollocks I’ve herd over the past few days. That’s why it’s getting boring now.

We are going to be out of The EU. So just accept it and maybe try and offer something going forward, instead of joining the wrong parties and petitions.
If your going to get involved maybe start in your community’s building bridges rather then throwing your dummy out of the pram.

So basically you think the facts are boring? You think the fact that before the Referendum we were a country carrying £1.6 trillion in debt and deep into austerity is boring. You will of course, be too bored to know that that debt is currently rising by £5,000 a second. You will be too bored to understand the massive crisis we have been plunged into by losing our triple star economy rating, because that sort of thing isn’t important to you, even though it has a massive impact on foreign investment and public spending, and now, more than ever we are a country that needs foreign investment and public spending. You will be too bored to find out that if you currently have a pension, that it has lost about 70% of its value since Friday. You will be yawning too hard to understand that none of our politicians is going to let us leave europe in any way that is meaningful to you. They are ALL agreed on either EEA or Single market join up. Were you too bored to understand that it means paying the same as we pay into the EU every year, that we still have to agree to freedom of movement over borders, that we still have to comply with trade agreements but we have no veto to stop what we don’t like? Were you too bored to understand that we need the EU because 45% of our trade is with them? Are you too bored to understand that leave promised to spend £111 billion pounds per year on this mythical country you think you’re going to get, and that we don’t have it. We have £1.6 trillion in debt and falling, and what we have lost over the last four days alone would pay for EU membership until my children are in their Seventies. Are you too bored to realise that it’s not the English remain vote who don’t believe in us, it’s the rest of the world. The money markets are global. They’re tanking because of us. They’re not welcoming us with open fucking arms. They’re blaming us. We don’t have anything to trade with. We’re not great. We’re stupid, and you’ve just proved it. AND YES. If you had really read my blog you would have seen that I am doing things to build bridges, regardless of my anger because I believe in the country that we have, not the made up fantasy of the one you’re still trying to peddle while the world crashes down round your fucking ears. Grow up. You won so we could all lose. Go and do something useful and get out from behind your keyboard.

And we’re still in the EU you fucking muppet. And even if we do trigger article fifty, we’re still in for the next two years, paying the same, doing the same, but negotiating from a position of weakness as our economy crashes and burns and all the things you wanted turn to dust and ashes. Try not being too bored to research your facts you disgrace.

The annuities market is tanking. The government have lost large sums off of pensions. It’s in the newspapers. I’m not about spreading lies. We had enough of that in the campaign in the run up to this. If you have a private pension and a keen broker, I expect they will have seen this coming and adjusted accordingly. Others may not be so lucky. I’ve already had one commenter who liquidated his pension yesterday so that he could save what he could.

Can I just say I am in awe KatyBoo1 – you are a Goddess and wordsmith extraordinaire and I am grateful for your comments. I am so relieved to find someone so articulate who can voice all my fears and reassure me that I didn’t just wake up in a parallel Universe of sh*tness, that this did happen, and I’m not the only one thoroughly confused and mortified in equal meaures. If you are leading the revolution, I am with you!!

I agree with a lot of what you say, I was a reluctant remainer and having come through a recession as I entered the job market, the last thing I wanted was more market upheaval, uncertainty and derelict job market.

But can you please explain the 70% pension figure? If someone had a pension fund tracking the FTSE, they would only be < 10% down.

D Madge, do you think they’ll have extra spelling and grammar classes once we are free from the EU?….hope so for your sake. I am afraid you are talking a lot (and spelling it wrongly) but not saying anything cogent at all….and that is really extremely boring

I think now is the time to return to God and seek His help. We used to be a Christian Country but sadly we have lost our way. The Bible says.
If my people who are called by my name become humble and pray, and look for me, and turn away from their evil ways, then I will hear them from heaven. I WILL forgive their sins and heal their land.
2 Chronicles 7: 14 easy to read version.

What you haven’t recognised here, what no-one in the Remain camp is recognising, (and I was a remain voter btw) is that the status quo was not working for 51% of the country. Yeah they voted on immigration, or lies about the NHS or whatever, but what they were SAYING if we open our ears is ‘We feel dis empowered, sidelined and patronised’. And all those things are true. The center left has failed the working class dismally. Before you tell me that regardless, the working class have kicked themselves in the face whilst kicking at the rest of us – yes, I am afraid, very afraid, this will prove to be correct. The poorest will suffer the worst, as they always do,

Especially if people like us don’t get up and try to help them. Because what else were they really supposed to do except make this protest vote? No one has given them a voice to talk about their marginalisation, about the system of privilege that is stacked against them. Don’t turn your back on them now, or you can guarantee it is the far right who will gather them up when as you rightly predict, they end up the biggest losers of the economic fallout of Brexit. Don’t be vengeful and pleased to pronounce ‘told you so’s’ when that happens. I fear this is Britain’s wake up call, our final chance to ally ourselves with the working class against everything the far right represents. We must find a way to present them with another option than the Farage’s, Le Pen’s, Trumps, a voice that works for them and us. If we don’t stop being angry with them for the grievances they rightly hold, we will loose them altogether.

The one positive thing I hear in this piece is that you have been politically galvanised by the outcome of Thursday. I beg you, use that drive to help the Leave voters, to find a way for their voices to be heard above the grief and pain of the Remain camp, because it is our voices that have always been represented, whereas the Leave voters have been screaming into a void for decades. Don’t let that void be replaced by the yawning cavern of the far right that is ready and waiting to consume them. We must find another way, we must reach out and listen to them and accept that a system that has been working very well for the more privileged and comfortable members of our society has not been working for them, and embrace this as a chance for real change. Change that has to happen, and will be forced on us regardless of what we want because you cannot ignore half the country, or continue to patronise them with the paternal attitude of the center left, that we know what is best for them. These are the final throws of the dying systems of 18th and 19th century, the working class must finally emerge and stand up as fully fledged adult members of our society, not children to be nudged into better behaviours by a superior middle class. We cannot stop this happening. We must stand alongside them in support or a world divided into far right and center left will emerge.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new is yet to be born. And in the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” (Antonio Gramsci)

From this situation please, let us fight for the new to finally be borne.

I was already political. I’ve been grass roots campaigning for years for the issues I’m passionate about. I was already a member of a political party, the WEP which allows multiple memberships, so now I’m part of another one. I already support my community, campaigning for my local doctor’s surgery, campaigning for the NHS, supporting literacy in schools. I have done for years. I’m not an armchair political warrior. The blog is where I dump my feelings so I can go out and act with compassion and do what feels right without anger muddying my voice. It is important to vent, because letting stuff out, allows you to let stuff go. I wanted proportional representation in the last election so that people could have a voice. I didn’t get it. Not my fault. Still campaigning for it. I’ve always been pro unite, but I’m not putting up with stupid.

37% of the country, not 51%, voted to leave. And sadly, the disaffected working class have voted for more, not less globalisation. The radical libertarians mock the EU precisely because of its attempts to temper the harsh winds of globalisation and preserve liberal democratic ideals within its borders.

HolCG this is precisely the problem: instead of this being a vote on the EU, it became a chance for showing their discontent at their lot, “what else were they really supposed to do except make this protest vote? No one has given them a voice to talk about their marginalisation, about the system of privilege that is stacked against them.” Ironically though, by voting to leave we have as a country made life so so so much harder

I think it would have been better if we had gone for PR at the last general election. Yes UKIP would have had more seats, but it would have been in a parliament that could deal with it, instead of this backlash we can’t deal with.

I share Katy’s anger and frustration and at the moment I don’t know how to make it stop, you make a really really important point HolCG and very eloquently put. We are at the last chance saloon for social justice and it’s unbelievably important that we get the next few weeks, months and years right – engage, be tolerant and take positive action. And ENOUGH of the “you’re stupid” jibes and condescending spelling corrections to people less fortunate in their education than ourselves. Nothing could be more alienating and, as you say, if we push people away, we push them into the arms of the fascists.

That’s going to help is it? Your logical argument and ability to cut through to the nub of the debate is astonishing. You are both articulate, passionate and clear. Have you thought about writing a book?

Believe me, sweetheart, your mind-numbing ranting, spouting figures and pseudo facts willy-nilly will not alter the situation. This country is divided, there are pros and cons on both sides, and self-serving anger doesn’t solve anything. I suggest you work on your anger issues and channel your energies elsewhere, preferably elsewhere.

You know what? I do channel my energies. At the risk of repeating myself for stupid fucking patronising cunts like you, I volunteer in schools, raise money for school libraries, teach children to read, campaign to save local doctor’s surgeries, hold my CCG to account for overspending with NHS England and campaign to keep our local education centre open. I’m also campaigning for proportional representation in the next election so stupid fucking bastards like you actually get a voice. Sometimes I wonder why. Don’t patronise me, and if you take so much issue with facts, you won’t mind when your pay packet starts to decrease will you, and your holidays get more expensive because you know, FACTS.

And how fucking abysmally stupid are you for reading it? I mean really. You’re a grown adult and you literally chose to find my corner of the internet and my personal blog and take the time to read it and write an ill advised comment. Who’s stupid now?

Hi Paul. Thank you, sincerely for reading, and for commenting. I appreciate it. But no, I am sorry. I am not going to stop swearing. This is my blog, in my corner of the internet. I have been blogging for a decade. It’s my rules, my gaff. I don’t advertise the blog, it went viral without me. I don’t accept payment for the blog. The only advertising on it is what WordPress put on. I deliberately don’t monetise my blog because I wish to be free to write what I want. I don’t write for other people. I write for me. This is my place to pour out exactly how I feel. If it speaks to you in some way, then that is terrific, really it is, and from the comments on here, it clearly does speak to some of you, but that’s a bonus. I realise that some people find swearing upsetting, but please. If Stephen Hawking wrote about quantum theory with the word ‘shit’ in it, would it be any less relevant? I genuinely do not mean to be disrespectful to you, but I stand firm that if I want to swear, I will, because swearing is better than hitting things or smashing things or hurting myself or any one of a number of options I could take if I bottled things up. And I’m afraid I don’t see it like you do, so sorry.

Hmm, another example of democracy, “if you don’t like it fuck off” if this is how your blog is ran, why bother asking for debate, as soon at it goes against you, you through the toys out he pram. Will unsubscribe if you post this!!

Please Zamo. Haven’t you got a life? Really. What are you actually trying to do. I don’t care if you unsubscribe. I am not your personal mouthpiece. I don’t owe you anything. I don’t have to prove anything to you and I don’t have to behave in any way that pleases you. This is MY blog. It’s space I pay for. And guess what. I have a block function. I have not used it yet, despite what you say about people going against you. I have taken on every single thing people have chosen to write, and those people who have disagreed with me politely, have been answered politely. No please do, go and get on with your life and stop wasting everyone’s time, including your own.

Fabulous Katy – sums up everything for me! I’ve tried to subscribe to your blog via email and I can’t – most of the time it says you’ve subscribed, even though I haven’t input my email and the one time I managed to do it, it rejected all my emails. Following you on Twitter now though so guess you share all your blogs to Twitter so I can pick them up there! 🙂 x

Let me explain how democracy works. An idea called a referendum is put to the electorate. All interested parties have months or years to put their opinions and hopes to the people. The election happens and one side has 3.8% more votes than the other. That means the side with the biggest SHARE of the votes has WON the election. It is then in a democracy incumbent on ALL of the electorate to accept and work with the new reality.

Because Vincent, democracy, as I put it, is a process. What part of that don’t you understand? That process allows disagreement. It allows protest. It allows people to change their minds and do things differently. To state otherwise is a lie, and would mean that we live in a dictatorship, which we don’t. What part of that don’t you understand? Democracy should also be based on both sides being able to make informed decisions based on factual information. Every single policy the leave voters ran on, turned out to be lies. That is not democratic. That is, to put it simply, fraud. As for the figures. Nigel Farage himself stated clearly that if the vote had been a 3.8% swing to remain, he would have legally contested it. In fact, the very petition that currently has 4 million votes on it asking for a second referendum was set up and launched in error by a pro leave activist. So do not tell me that if the vote had gone the other way you would not be exercising your democratic right to protest, and if you do say that, then more fool you. You live in a democracy Vincent, let me explain it to you in words you can understand, democracy does not stop on the day that you get the result you want. WHAT PART OF THE ABOVE IS STILL NOT UNDERSTOOD?

I’m pretty sure that Katy understands the concept of democracy that you have so helpfully reiterated to us here. If someone could please explain to me how democracy can said to be functioning correctly when significant portions of the voters did so on the basis of lies and didn’t understand the full impact of the decision then I would be very interested to hear it. If people voted on the basis of reduced immigration and more money for the NHS and the campaigners followed through on that then I accept your argument. But when people are now regretting their vote because they voted on the basis of LIES and the very next day the campaigners turned around and went back on their promises then in my eyes democracy cannot be said to be functioning effectively.

I don’t understand, so when a political party wins an election, we should all go ‘we’re all conservatives now, lets not oppose anything that party says that’s fine, someone has won, scrap the opposition’?

Reblogged this on Paleo and Polkadots and commented:
I agree with almost everything Katy has said – this referendum has been a complete clusterfuck on all fronts. I’m fed up of being told to calm down, to get over it because it was oh so democratic. I’m angry, and I have every bloody right to be.

Thank you for putting into words exactly how I have been feeling! I’m sick of being told to calm down, and having people tell me how very democratic this all is -I’m absolutely f*cking livid over the whole affair, and I don’t think I’m going to stop being livid for some time. x

Hi Emily
You may want to add to Daniel Hannan statement his love of the NHS.. Also he was sent Brussel to reform and he has done nothing!! If you want someone to tell you what you want to hear.. he is your man. He will send your Cognitive Bias into overdrive. Potcher turn gamekeeper if ever their was one. Or in this case applying for Gamekeeper!! (Another Career motivated politician like Boris who can be seen on video stating a case for Turkey’s entry to the EU). Something I have been saying that get the leavers thinking is along the lines of once the younger voters have control they will rejoin which would likely see us paying all of the £350m per week and having to adopt the Euro!! He who dares doesn’t alway win Rodney!!

OK. Let me understand this. My blog post. The blog post of one woman in a country of millions, is responsible for making our entire country look silly is it? Right? It isn’t the fact that you leavers swallowed a pack of lies hook, line and sinker and let it become the reason we are now in the biggest financial crisis for our country since we had to attempt to rebuild Britain after the second world war? No? It wouldn’t be the fact that Nigel Farage is making us look like a laughing stock and you could actually watch the pound falling as he spoke today to the EU? No? It wasn’t the fact that we have crippled our entire country for generations to come that made us look silly? It was me, and people like me? People who are actually quoting facts. People who are actually trying to do something, and you don’t like my fucking language? Well you can fucking do one. You can’t even get your pretend name right as an avatar for fuck’s sake. This is my blog, not one of those disgusting Murdoch rags. So fuck the fuck off and don’t let the fucking door hit you on the way out. Fuckity bye.

As a Brit living in another part of the world (the US), it is the decision to leave the EU that has left everyone flabbergasted.

Well….except for the Trump supporters – they’re loving it – and those people are damn scary. The irony is, you have Trump supporters who are Polish immigrants applauding the Brits for trying to tighten their borders against Polish immigrants. Their memory is short, and they easily forget that not all racism and xenophobia is targeted at non-white faces.

Your comments are all one sided lets look at some of the reasons we were right to leave the EU
The EU were killing us
Cadbury moved their factory to Poland 2011 with EU grant
Ford transit moved to Turkey 2013 with EU grant
Jaguar/land Rover has recently agreed to build a new plant in Slovakia with EU grant owned by Tata the same company that trashed our steel works and emptied the workers pension funds
Peugeot closed its Ryton plant and moved production to Slovakia with EU grant
British army’s new Ajax fighting vehicles to be built n Spain using Swedish steel at the request of the EU, to support jobs in Spain with EU grant, rather than use Wales Dyson gone to Malaysia with an EU loan
Crown Closures (was Metal Box) gone to Poland with EU grant once employing 1200 people
M & S manufacturing gone to far east with EU loan
Hornby models gone in fact all toys and models now gone all with EU grants
Gillette gone to eastern Europe with EU grant
Texas instruments Greenock gone to Germany with EU grant
Indesit at Bodelwyddan Wales gone with EU grant
Hoover Merthyr factory moved out of UK to Czech Republic and the far east by Italian company Candy with EU backing
There are many more examples of this type of thing so anyone who thinks the EU is good for British industry or any other business simply hasn’t paid attention to what has been systematically asset stripped from the UK
Perhaps you can tell me something that has gone the other way I can’t find any

How were they killing us again? Please ignore the billion pounds a year that the EU gives to Cornwall, without which it would be on its arse, and which it is currently panicking about. Please ignore the billions into Wales, ditto. Please ignore the subsidies propping up the small, independent farmers who need them to survive. If you have a problem with the way that the business community chooses to behave, take it up with our austerity government, our tax shy chancellor of the Exchequer and the businesses themselves. If our government were more invested in the UK businesses themselves and exercised the sovereignty they had to put investment into these businesses maybe they wouldn’t have moved? Or is that a stupid idea?

You are not alone,sister.Yes,I felt like shouting Sturgeon for Prime Minster over the weekend.Carney actually was the only one with an obvious plan.Ken Clarke’s question in Parliament Monday can be paraphrased in a way that the ‘honourable and learned’ gentleman would never use ” Cameron,you fucking witless fuckwit”.The great British public largely did not see the irony of those without the proper authority or power making dodgy promises to spend all that lovely EU money( how much was it again,let’s not concern ourselves with trivial detail of a few million quid ?)But,the Public have spoken for good or ill.History will show whether we committed suicide or we are justified and vindicated by our choice.The complexities are only just revealing themselves.England lost to Icelend.For many that is the real national tragedy.Foreigners…..cause of all our problems,innit?

I am now exhausted by ‘discussing’ this with leave voters and have used many of your arguments in doing so. But. Your blog says it all so much better than I ever could or can. It is always tiring when dealing with rhetoric, dogma and indoctrination spouting forth. I am reminding myself, several times a day, that I will not fall out with family or friends over this. If we don’t speak we can’t have a dialogue and if we fail to do so then we are no longer actively democratic. We, as voters, should not behave like children who’ve been told they can’t have more ice-cream. In other words – no tantrums or there will be tears before all our bedtimes! And that serves no useful purpose except to divide us further and leave us exposed to the politicos. Nichola may be a lone voice for now when it comes to sensible behaviour but I hope for the sake of the UK that she is joined by the other grown-up politicians damned fast.

Fuck me. Thanks, at least I feel a little better. So many just don’t understand us that this is only the beginning. Did you see that poor chap on C4 News? He voted to exit as was looking forward to the local factories opening again. He was in the NE. I felt desperately sorry for him.

An excellent piece that reflects my feelings.
Shamefully I am not being as proactive as you in trying to aid steer this ship.
However, a job and a young family and trying to continue since semblance of normal life is my excuse.
A poor one at that
Thank you for expressing what both my wife, many of my friends and I are feeling.

As a point to add, Democratic process revolves around informed decision…….

If any readers of Katy’s post find it boring they have their head in the sand, this is real and our country is heading around the u-bend as I type this

Totally agree with everything here. Sick of ‘friends’ on Facebook making comments like “the Remainers need to get over it and stop ranting on”. This, coming from the people who apparently were so motivated to vote in the referendum that they got us into this mess, but are now unwilling to take the discussion any further, as if it was all done-and-dusted on Friday. What astounds me more is the high-and-mighty attitude that suggests that had the Remain side won, they wouldn’t themselves be up in arms, raging about the “fat cat elite” rigging the vote (which they were already hedging their bets for during Pengate). Maybe if a lot of the Leavers were unhappy with the status quo and what was happening in their local town, they should have long ago been campaigning for more, both locally and on a higher level. Instead, many checked a box on Thursday and declared that they had “won”, only to seemingly go back to saying that they don’t care about politics and don’t want to talk about it any more. Leaving the rest of us to gravitate between a permanent state of anger and fear over what is happening to our country in the aftermath.

This is exactly how I feel and am so glad that others feel the same way!!! I’m American and have lived here with my British partner for 10 years. I’m not a citizen yet, so was unable to vote, which gets me even more riled up. I haven’t been able to afford my citizenship, but in light of that, I still campaigned heavily for Labour at first, then The Greens. I would have voted Remain and campaigned for them. All I get now on FB is either those who agree with me completely or those who are telling me, I’m not respecting their choice. It’s like a red flag to a bull when respect and democracy are thrown at me, like I’m a baby sitting out my dummy!!!! I’m going to share the hell out of this and tell any Leaver to unfriend me as I’m still on the rampage! Lol xx

Well done – you have said everything I’ve been feeling since Friday – only I haven’t found the words! Thank you. And yes, I too am LIVID! Quite apart from points 1-8 in your able dissertation, I am a Brit Cit living abroad, so had no vote, and am furious that a meagre 51.x% vote has potentially shot me and my family (as well as the UK), in the foot. I hope Remainers will lobby their MPs like hell, as the ultimate Parliamentary vote is what will make or break this ludicrous situation. I’d like 5 minutes alone with ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron for putting everyone in this situation.
By the way, I’m eagerly looking forward to ninethly and tenthly.

Katy ..this Perfectly sums up our household right now…..apparently the Brexiters are already blaming everybody else for talking the economy down…….so the Leavers have got a situation that they never wanted and it is their fault when all the shit hits the fan…well if that is the case at least someone will be shouldering the blame, as no other f**cker seems to want it!

Can I offer one correction to an article I agree with 100%. Nigel Farage is elected, I should know he’s one of my MEP’s.
Unfortunately.
You’ve said what many of us feel with great aplomb. (Better than I managed on the book faces the other day).

The finest piece I’ve read since this tragedy enfolded on Friday. Says everything I’d like to have said but much better than anything I could have written. I agree with every word. Thank you so much for this.

Just read your article.. Was going to respond in the comments section but noticed your standard response is a tirade of abuse and tantrum so frankly can’t be bothered…Shame as you highlight some interesting points

Graham. What a passive aggressive post that you use to respond to something you say you’re not going to respond to. Very much like when my children say ‘I’m not allowed to say ‘shit’ am I mummy?’ Guess what. If you’re not offensive to me, and you don’t lecture me like an idiot or tell me that it is me and people like me, not thinking positively about what is happening to us that is causing economic melt down, and you genuinely have something positive to say or something factually enlightening, I welcome your posts. If, on the other hand, you want a whipping boy to make yourself feel better, then please don’t bother. Please don’t point out to me something I’ve already pointed out on my post. Please don’t tell me what democracy means. Don’t waste your time. This is my blog. It is my own space where I am free to write what I like. I allow comments on here because I believe in communication as a tool and swearing is one of those tools. I can block comments before they even get published if I want. I don’t because I’m open to dialogue, but only constructive dialogue not based on lies. Now then, are you going to discuss this with me properly, or are you going to hide behind a facetious comment about a ‘tirade of abuse’ to make yourself look morally superior without actually having done or said anything to make a valid point? Your call, Graham.

please keep on ranting. spoke from my heart but also made me laugh. very much needed at the moment. i have been asking for weeks, where is the plan to get out?
also we have voted a yes no referendum on something highly complex, which can’t be answered in yes or no terms.
anyway you have put it very well.

Gosh Johnny. What I like most about Brexiters, apart from their exceptional ability to swallow lies wholesale, and their teflon shoulders when it all goes wrong, is their insistence on reasoned, informed debate. I mean, no Brexiter who I’ve come across so far has even thought to come down to the level of patronising insults as a way forward. They honestly love to air the facts openly and come to a debate about what happens next with no ill will, no inability to see the other point of view and a willingness to accept fault when they have landed the whole country in turmoil. They really are the best of people, Johnny, and I think that your comment sums that up in a nutshell. You must be so proud, and if you genuinely are, you must also be so deluded.

Reblogged this on writeovertheedge and commented:
This sums up exactly how I am feeling about the Brexit vote, but I’ve been too depressed and angry to write about it. I think Katy has said it far better than I could anyway!

What was anyone going to do about our country’s decline if we stayed ??? I’ll tell you no one . your the minority of the countrys vote now.we wanted change and the politicians we pay better do a good job now or they will get sacked until they get it right !

You know it doesn’t work like that don’t you Gavin? Our country’s decline is directly the responsibility of our austerity government because, believe it or not, they have sovereignty and only 13% of our countries laws were made by the EU, and we could have vetoed those 13% but we didn’t, because they worked for our elected government at the time. Do you understand that? Also, you cannot sack the government, Gavin. You have literally no power to do that. You gave the power to the current majority party when you elected them. They decide, not you. The only people who could protect you, ironically enough, are the EU bodies like the European Court of Human Rights, which we are soon to exit from as well, thanks to you giving the Tories the power to do this. You have voted to isolate yourselves with the government that put you in this position in the first place. Well done. Massive round of applause. And don’t tell me we don’t have sovereignty, because the only reason Article 50 hasn’t been triggered yet is sovereignty. The EU want us to go now. Our government is blocking it by not triggering it.

There not blocking it its not going to be a quick easy process it could take years weather the EU wants it or not , you just don’t understand why this has happened! Why the majority of the country voted this way! It was to send a message and one that thankfully has been well and truly heard ! I don’t want to be European i want to stay British ! I don’t want my law s governed by European bureaucrates ! I don’t want any more Europeans coming over here taking our jobs, ect,ect . whatever the consequences im glad we’ve stirred the pot and got the change ball rolling ☺

Very succinctly put. I feel very blessed to be a Scot living in Scotland as we at least have a chance but I am heart sorry for anyone who has to live in the England that some thoughtless egotistical politicians have created.

Brilliantly put, I was lost for words / too angry to explain how I was feeling and this appeared on my facebook feed!! I will be sharing to explain once and for all my position on the matter. My main issue is how the Leave campaign could run based on lies, withdraw their promises within hours of the result and still have no comeuppance? Surely there should be some kind of process to deal with this fraud?? But thank you again for such a brilliant piece, and I look forward to points 9 and 10 as they unfold!!

Totally agree. It’s as the late great Sir John Harvey-Jones put it, “Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. And the nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression..”

All I can say is WELL SAID! “Leave and take back control” was what I was seeing everywhere. I told these people that leaving was the best way of giving it all away! How right I am sadly. Nothing has changed with the arguments I heard for leaving. “We have to do something about the immigrants” was the most I heard. Those people I spoke to didn’t know the rules of the game let alone how to play it! How many more were there like that?
And, who in their right mind uses this kind of monumental decision to raise a “protest vote” assuming that the vote would be to stay? Numpties to be sure! The people needed educating on the facts first, but the problem is that the politicians were too busy being “political”, they forgot what they are here for, which is to uphold the confidence of the people. Lies always get you found out, but everyone who voted leave will have someone to blame rather than themselves for voting for it when it all goes completely down the pan.
I thought a real democratic vote needs an “absolute” majority. In other words, if 50.01% of those ELIGIBLE to vote decided leave was the best, then there could not be any argument on the will of the people, however stupid the decision is. The facts are that, because of bad decisions and unintelligent assumptions that the country would vote to remain, we have less than 40% of people deciding for the majority of over 60%. This can never be right, no matter what side you are on.
We have to raise a voice of reason to the politicians now who represent us and see if there can be a way to unite all of us again.
The UK needs a say, but we have lost it! The union will fall apart because of this if article 50 is triggered. Strength does not come from isolation, which is where the world is beginning to see us.
I hope common sense prevails, but I fear that we are going to be tearing each other apart for a while yet.

Superb blog and is very accurate. The whole democracy line of the majority voted is such a flawed argument.

This whole thing started with Cameron giving us a referendum to vote on something that we as a population have no idea how it works.

I think right now, the most democratic thing to do is for Cameron to step up and say, we will remain in the EU. We made the mistake of letting something so monumental be decided on something the vast majority don’t understand.

He will piss off half the country (that’s how close the vote was anyone bar a million or so people) and things can go back to normal. We’ll be the butt of a few jokes for a while and eventually we would adoringly become “bloody brits”

Out of all of this crap and bad government, I honestly believe his only redeeming feature out of this is that he’s stepped down and someone new to take over in october which gives everyone a bit of time to actually process what is happening and hopefully avoid this whole thing together.

Can’t understand why your blog was so long winded when all you were saying was that the stupid uneducated plebs that believed all the lies that the leave campaign told them(of course the remain camp were totally honest)didn’t agree with you.Grow up for God’s sake and stick your dummy back in your mouth after you have extracted your head from your arse.

Interesting grasp of biology there, Alex. Clearly as good as your grasp of politics and the economy. Well done. It’s my blog. I’m allowed to write my opinions. I have done so. Do you know why I am allowed to do that? Because we live in a democracy, Alex. A democracy which you decided ended on Friday morning in favour of a dictatorship. Guess what? it didn’t. And nor did our membership of the EU. The only things that have changed is that you think you have a right to spout bile in response to reasoned thinking and facts, but ones that don’t suit your narrative. And you do, because guess what? Democracy. But what fascinates me most, Alex is that you read this. You chose to sit there and read something that upset you so much, but you couldn’t quite figure out that you didn’t have to read it, and you didn’t have to respond. You are never going to get those minutes back, and the words I’ve said here will haunt your brain for the rest of your life because you can’t unsee and unknown what I’ve said. And you think you’ve won? You think that what you’ve said has upset me? Ha ha! And what did you think you would achieve in your comment? Did you think; ‘What a fantastic man everyone will think I am when I post this. It will make me seem smart, intelligent and reasoned, and just the sort of person who should be deciding the fate of our country?’ I hope not, because you’re going to be sadly disappointed, just as you are when we don’t wake up in the utopia you thought you were getting and which is never going to happen, even if we do trigger article 50. And you’re wrong. My family voted out. They’re not stupid. They’re not uneducated plebs. They believed in what they voted for, and I believed different, and that’s ok, as long as we can talk about it without the sort of toss pot off the cuff venom you espouse muddying the waters. And I’m working class, and tonight I’m going to a solidarity meeting for ALL the members of my city. What are you doing Alex except hiding your shame behind cocking off at strangers?

Thank you for writing this, I feel the same. Day 5 and I am still fuming with rage. My son is 17 and planning to study science in the Netherlands, and now that is all up in the air because of this ridiculous referendum that should never have happened. He didn’t even have the chance to vote in something that affects his future so dramatically. Tonight we will all be sending letters to our MP to ask him to veto the result when it goes to parliament because the leave campaign was based entirely on fraudulent claims. I wish I could say I am remaining impartial in my feelings towards individual leave voters, but I am furious with my in laws, who still voted brexit in the full knowledge that it would stuff up their grandson’s plans if it came to fruition.

Just thought i would clarify about the pension thing. When you retire you need to convert your pension into an income. Annuities are one way to do this. They work by you handing over your pension pot for an agreed income and last week you might have got an annual income of £4000 (4%) to £5000 (5%) per £100,000, now as the annuity rates have fallen a couple of % we are now talking £2000 (2%) or £3000 (3%). There are other ways to access a pension income and it is now more essential than ever to take advice.

I’m stunned that so many have bought into the fear mongering, and this post just goes to prove how the media frenzy can have an adverse impact on seemingly reasonable people.

Have you checked exchange rates worldwide against the pound? The only currency it’s doing very poor against is the USD and that was on the rise pre-Brexit anyway.

Chill out. Nothing is going to change, not for years, and when it does? It’s likely you will find that Britain’s economy will thrive. The only thing tanking is the stock market but that’s the risk people take when they play on it. It’s a gamble. Look at 911. Look at BP’s after the oil spill. A drastic change of whether can drop shares like stones, but they always steady again.

You claim the banks are making a loss. Yes, they are. Barclays and the Bank of England. Even others have claimed small drops in profits. It only makes a difference to those near the top who rely on hundreds of thousands in bonuses every year. Not us. In fact, a few have even made a profit of late, but the media doesn’t report that as freely, therefore it must not happen.

Politics is bullshit. I agree, we won’t get a chance to elect a leader. But if they arse it up? We’ll get to change again then.

As for Nicola Sturgeon? She started years ago not wanting to be part of the EU. She’s now changed her tune with the majority of voters in Scotland. You can’t trust a politician, but that’s the country we live in.

All this anger isn’t worth it. As a whole, people need to accept it and get on with their lives. Mob mentality is not the way to go.

And before you start attacking me I didn’t vote. I felt there wasn’t enough information provided by either side of the argument so let happen what happens. Same with the Scottish Independence vote. Neither side gave facts, only ridiculous claims and scare mongering. Same goes here.

Ella. I’m not attacking people who don’t attack me. I don’t agree with you. I’m not advocating mob mentality. I’m using my personal blog space to write out my concerns and fears with the facts I have. You cannot argue that the leavers lied, or that the markets are not good. They just aren’t. And I know that in the end, our economy will pull itself out of the mire, but at what cost socially and for every person in the UK. It’s something that takes time, and as we are already deep into austerity time is not necessarily something we have. And I’m advocating we get out and do something positive, whether you see it as positive or not is not really the issue. Everyone had the right to vote the way they felt, and I have a lot of sympathy for those who abstained. I didn’t vote for years based on the fact that I couldn’t choose between shit and shit. I believe in grass roots change. I believe and act on making a better country, but I am allowed to have my worries and my fears and a place to put them, and the post was written in response to those people who vehemently denied me that space and could only offer ‘calm down’ as a response.

Just a quick note, the stock market does effect us all, well most of us that work anyhow, our personal pension schemes are invested in the stock market. Now shares may well recover over time and all will be well for those that don’t need to access funds very soon.
My sympathy goes to all those people who are thinking of retiring in the next few weeks and months, for those people these losses may well effect their retirement income for the rest of their lives.

Most of the people who voted leave almost certainly don’t have a personal pension plan and have never heard of a SIPP; the stock market and exchange rate does not affect them. You don’t seem to understand that these concerns are yours not theirs and the loss is yours not theirs.

Ella I work for a company that takes EU funding and puts it to good use in our region by investing it in projects which also bring a good chunk of their budget from outside the region (frequently from outside the EU too). My partner works at a university where she leads the team which secures and distributes their EU funding around the academics. Yesterday one of the academics reported that he’s already been frozen out of two collaborations with European Universites because they now doubt the ability of the UK to deliver on their part of the funding. The impact is happening already, and it is happening negatively.

It therefore doesn’t take a genius to work out that both of our jobs are on the line and we therefore need to have a pretty radical look at our careers and work out what we’re going to do to pay the mortgage next year. it is extremely painful to hear vote leavers telling me “tough shit get over it” as if all I have to do is just passively accept a new political landscape, when what we’ve actually got to do is totally change our lives.

To some extent I blame the appallingly bad Remain campaign for not properly reaching out to people such as yourself – if they could have maybe just concentrated on one or two positive effects of EU funding would that have swayed you? How about a film of someone recovering from an illness where the cure for that illness was developed in collaboration with a UK University Hospital and their European counterparts? Happens all the time and now in jeopardy. How about a Welsh arts project that takes kids off the streets and helps develop their creative skills and gives them hope for a future, all co-funded with EU money – happens all the time. Would any of that have helped you to vote remain?

Of course there’s a chance that we could use some of the fabled “£350m a week” to replace funding for projects like those, and replace the funding which currently pays the salaries of my partner and I, but as you can imagine given the wholescale backtracking from this £350m a week number, we don’t hold out much hope. Likewise even if the UK replaces the hospital project example I described above, the very spirit of collaboration with our EU colleagues will still, to some extent, remain broken. Katy’s blog nails my sentiments perfectly.

You’re right, the anger isn’t worth it, but I hope this reply explains to you why it’s there, my goodness it’s there. Yes, we will of course “deal with it” because that’s what we do. It will take time but we will “deal with it” and we will do all that we can to rebuild this country for the people who live here – suffice to say from what I’ve seen so far it won’t be with much assistance from most of the vote leavers who caused all this mess.

Sorry Ella, but you are wrong about exchange rates. I do check every day. The dollar is not the only currency affected; the exchange rate sterling to Euro has also been hit as anyone with financial commitments in Euros will tell you. Also, if you are a party member, then you do get a chance to elect the party leader (both Labour and Conservative). I am with the majority of people reading this blog; we have been manipulated into a terrible position by the political elite who have shown their true colours yet have somehow managed to retain a good degree of popular support. I am unable to chill as you suggest as things are already happening. Trading in two British banks was suspended on the Stock Exchange due to big losses; are we heading for more bail outs by the tax payer? Are Japanese car plants in the UK going to relocate to a nation within the EU? I have heard that workers in Sunderland have already been warned since the Leave vote that this is now going to happen. HSBC are moving 1000 London jobs to France to deal with their Euro commitments. I have just watched the speech that Nigel Farage gave to the EU Parliament and I felt ashamed of his behaviour. He was even more confident than usual in the delivery of his bile. Unfortunately, other haters have also become more confident, as shown with the delivery of laminated ‘Go home’ messages (in English and Polish) to the letter boxes of Polish families and left outside schools.I hope that this is not a sign of things to come. I am proud to be both British and European. I do not understand the negative attitudes of many British people towards our fellow Europeans.

It is not my intention to attack you in any way but, I’m afraid your assertion that only USD/GBP has been affected is untrue. I am married to a Norwegian so our personal finances are directly tied to changes in krone. I routinely monitor NOK, dollars and the Euro. I have average daily rate tables going back to January right in front of me and the exchange rates of all 3 throughout this post-referendum period are the lowest they’ve been all year – beyond normal fluctuations too.

All the jumbles and frustrations that have been racing round my noggin for the last few days all eloquently transcribed. Definitely feel buoyed knowing many of us think the same and there’s good reason to battle on. Thank you.

I hate this and everything in it. I think you should be forced to do jury service so that you know what democracy really is. It’s people like you that do absolutely NOTHING to improve the world or life around you.
One point you raised about being on a boat and not able to get off it – yes you can, go and live in another country.

What are you talking about please? What has doing jury service got to do with understanding democracy? The fact that I spent the last five years doing unpaid work in school libraries and teaching children to read doesn’t help my community? The fact that I have spent four months this year campaigning to keep my local doctor’s surgery open, doesn’t help my community? The fact that I am an active member of two political parties and am about to embark on a campaign to try to save my city’s adult learning college is not doing anything for my community? And you assume that I can just pick up and go and live in another country? Literally nothing you have said has any truth. Well done.

Excellent article, a perfect summary of the state of woe experienced by the 48%. I’ll spread it around my friends for appreciation! I would also add – although it is not an argument I forwarded during the campaign due to it already being a divisive issue – that my primary source of frustration is that at a time when we are faced with serious climate change issues which spread well beyond our borders, our country has decided to shut itself away and bury our heads in the sand (albeit our “sovereign” sand, whatever that is!). I have little hope that a newly isolated U.K. which is trying to rebuild its self-sabotaged economy will spare much time to consider environmental issues.

Spot on katyboo and very well put. This is the single most dishonest and destructive con ever to have been pulled on the British public. I was in Scotland when it happened and really did not want to come back to an England I do not recognise. Or maybe it was hiding there all the time. As someone brought up in the NorthWest I am only too well aware of the xenophobic and yes, racist, attitudes that sadly still lie not far below the surface in more than a few people. Its partly why Ive lived and worked in and around London, still the worlds most open and cosmopolitan City. Those attitudes have now been legitimised by the most appalling campaign that relied overwhelmingly on dishonest and blatantly racist claims about foreigners and immigrants

I have no hesitation in pointing this out to those I know who voted Brexit. They lent their vote to a racist campaign, how ever much they try to back-pedal now. Jo Cox’s murder was a warning. We are now seeing the follow-up in racist incidents. There are some people you just should not sup with, however long the spoon and whatever your cause.

And I havn’t even started on what my kids think and the impact on their futures. Yes they did vote. I strongly suspect that for them, like others of their generation, emigration has become a very attractive option. Leaving behind an ageing and bitter English population, still looking for someone to blame for their ills

(With apologies to those who like me voted Remain as the much, much lesser or two evils)

Thanks Katyboo1 for this great post. You have put into words a lot of the things I have been feeling. I have written a couple of articles myself, if you are interested, though they are probably more emotional than yours. Keep up the good work! x https://juliasbigadventure.wordpress.com/

Brilliant, thank you. The other point that makes me mad is how stupid the reasoning is behind ‘getting back control’ when we are still a member of the IMF, the WTO, the UN, NATO not to mention the frigging global economy! You want control? Start by controlling sterling then! We’re all watching.

And I’m so enraged by hearing they need us more than we need them (Farage said it again today in front of their faces) when UK accounts for 7% of the EU’s trade and the EU accounts for 45% of our trade!! That completely incorrect soundbite has been shot off so much that many of the Leave voters really do believe it.

I totally agree and feel exactly the same in a totally heartfelt way. You are not alone Katy. I am bitter, depressed, upset, angry, emabarrassed and tired. So is my wife and my kids (24 and 22). My parents on the other hand, I spoke with them yesterday and they told me they voted ‘leave’. They voted leave as they “wanted to get control back so the Belgians can’t tell us what type of bananas we can sell”. Sums it all up really. It’s no wonder we feel like we do, we are entitled to.

My sadness here is the lack of understanding of why the EU is so important, it’s not about trade, free movement, sovereignty, the colour of your passport or anything else. It’s about fostering respect and understanding between the nations of Europe. As the Irish would say, we don’t know our history.

About a year ago there was a news story that the British government had finally paid off a long standing bond – aka. a debt. When I say long standing, I mean one hundred years old. It was a war bond from the Great War, the war to end all wars, that was going to be over by Christmas!

Wars are expensive, we are still paying off the huge debts incurred in the 1939-45 conflict. Europe as a continent has been riven by wars for about as long as it’s been lived in by man, the Treaty of Rome, the founding treaty of what is now the EU was drafted by a generation of men who knew what war meant, they had lived the horror on both sides of the conflict. Along with NATO the EU and its predecessor organisations have successfully maintained the peace on this contested corner of the globe for 70 years now. I wonder how many of those that lived through WWII as adults would have believed that possible then.

This has been achieved through talking, compromise, bribery, a little corruption, trade and diplomacy. By weaving our countries together, nurturing new nations as they emerge from tyranny and spreading the prosperity, however unevenly, across the whole continent we keep the forces of hate and conflict suppressed. However, they can never be eradicated altogether.

For those that say this is scaremongering and Operation Fear, take a look Sarajevo, it doesn’t take much to light the blue touch paper.

The prosperity that Western Europe has enjoyed is the latter half of the twentieth century is as a direct result of this ‘peace dividend’. The post war baby boom worked and paid their taxes, Britain grew prosperous and people saw an ever improving standard of living, this became their ‘right’, the NHS and welfare state were born and these tax revenues paid pensions to the elderly, child benefits to families and pledged to look after the population from ‘cradle to grave’.

Now that population boom are at or are nearing their own retirement ages, they no longer pay in their taxes but expect the pensions and healthcare that they have provided to previous generations through their taxes. But there are less British people of working age around to pay into the system, pensions, with their triple locks and ever more sophisticated health care demands are swallowing vast amounts of tax revenues.

Meanwhile, the younger generations are saying, ‘why isn’t my standard of living getting better as it did for my parents and grandparents? I’m working and paying my taxes but I don’t see the benefit of it’

This all becomes a recipe for blame, it must be someone’s fault and for a certain breed of politicians it becomes easy to play into these narratives of blame and discontent. The fact that the vast majority of the migrants that come to this country from the EU are working and paying their taxes so that the NHS and the welfare state / pensions can continue to function doesn’t seem to register. Some that come over are criminals and ‘here for the benefits’, so that is enough, because no British person can be either a criminal or benefits cheat !

There are examples of what happens when you scapegoat a section of society all around us. Uganda springs to mind, the Balkans, Rwanda, and then of course, the one we are not allowed to mention …

So Katyboo1, I kept reading your stuff and very sorry to read how angry you are at the moment, but I nearly lost the will to carry on once your choice of words became offensive calling those who run our country “fuckwits” “clusterfuck” etc. However, I persevered through your passionate, but wholly negative and deenergising ranting, which unfortunately cloakes some rather interesting points from the IN crowd. I get your anger and frustration 100% and your post makes very interesting reading, once sanitised – but it’s clear just how pissed you are with your view of the world right now and one look at your profile pic confirms this.
If and when you come out of your current destructive state of consciousness and become positively resourceful again, I would genuinely like to read about how your passionate perspective might be creatively focussed on constructive ways to build positive momentum at the reforming frontiers we are now faced with across the piste of life on our “boat” together. Bale out, help navigate, sustain the crew/passengers, be ballast, jump out, sink or swim… It’s up to you to decide if and when, but its in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped, so choose wisely. After all, you cannot control the external world, but you can control your internal world and what it means to you. God bless.

firstly Bob. It’s my blog. I swear. You don’t have to read it. And I will continue to swear, so you might want to bail now. You make a lot of assumptions about me. I campaign. I work for literacy in schools, I help fund and run school libraries when governments fail them. I campaign to save Dr’s surgeries and expose the corruption in my local NHS governing body. I was interviewed on World at One about this. I am one of the few who have actually managed to get a CCG held to account by NHS England for failing the public. I am about to help try to save my adult education college which is threatened with closure. I’m in two political parties. I write regularly to my MP. I’ve even met with him a few times to sort out some of the messes our austerity government has gotten us into. Even though I am ‘negative’. I am taking my children and my friends and neighbour to a rally to promote solidarity and peace in my city this evening. What are you doing? Apart from criticising me when you’ve read one whole blog post and made a judgement based on an avatar photo. My avatar photo on Facebook is a trifle. What does that say about me, Bob? I think your comment speaks volumes about you, and you know nothing about me. Feel free to not read on. I don’t write for you. It’s my blog. I write for me. If you don’t like it, there are millions out there.

I would like to point out I did not withhold my vote because I was unable to decide. Both sides lied repeatedly – that seems to be British politics in a nutshell and the reason I never vote on general elections. If I did, it would pretty much mean choosing the prettiest lie and ending up disappointed.

Not to mention the fact that David Cameron expressed when he attended university the EU was going to destroy Britain’s economy, yet now he argued the fact that we are better if we stay? I didn’t vote because I didn’t particularly trust anyone enough to back their campaign.

I saw another commenter here is a remain voter and is now dedicated to help the leave decision work. Though I am still on the fence and unsure of the future, I think that is the right thing to do. The more the public causes an uproar, the more the little boys in power will panic and we’ll all end up regretting that, because they will make a mess of negotiations.

I imagine, depending on the outcomes of the negotiations with the EU on leaving terms, the only UK companies that will be affected are those who trade/work in Europe. I am not sure why you feel you or others’ future is in jeopardy, other than the media scare tales about pensions, universities and jobs, but I have read through a lot of unbiased financial information on the economy as well as reassurances from the Law Society of Scotland and England and have to say that I am not afraid of the future. And if a new prime minister arses it up, then we vote another party next time. That’s what we did when Labour buggered up. I’m sure that’s what we will do again.

Brilliant! Thank you.
I have felt for some years now, that there has been a worrying rise in support for right wing politicians, not just in the UK. How can we best come together to prove there is another way?

Succinctly put, i am Irish and I fear for the long term damage to OUR economy as a result of this farce. I did predict the outcome, not that it gives me any solace. The British working people, just like working people around the world, are rightly upset at being pawns of those very few obscenely wealthy turds who had us pay for their failed financial gambles. Now when I say “failed” this did not apply to them as they have emerged from the global collapse even wealthier!
It is all this which has allowed the empty rhetoric of Boris & Donald to take centre stage and advance their own personal ambitions with little or no regard for the people they conned into voting for them.
Finally to those who read this and respond “F**k Off Paddy” I simply say “I served in your Air Force for seven years and contributed to the UK coffers through my taxes for 12 so F**k You too!”

Katy you have summed up his I feel completely. Thank you. I’m fed up of people telling me to stop taking it so seriously. We have been totally fucked by Caneron & Johnson, playing out some school boy rivalry with the country as poker chips. I’m disgusted. Thank you for writing this xx

Fabulous post. Pretty much encapsulates how I’ve been feeling since Friday. Financial turmoil, economic uncertainty in a political vacuum, with the legitimisation of old school racism to boot. And all entirely self-inflicted. What have we done? 😦

Reblogged this on From Pyrenees to Pennines and commented:
Nothing else seems to matter at the moment. It’s hard to focus on life outside the post-referendum nightmare, hard to believe that after securing about 52% of the vote (and just 72% of the electorate voted), leaving the EU seems to be universally accepted in the House of Commons – though not out here, not in the wider community I know. Like just about everyone I come across, I’m angry, upset and feeling pretty impotent. Then I read this. It pretty much sums up how I feel. Please read it.

All I can say is that I thought you hit the nail on the head. I was one of those thinking that it was time to get on with it now. I voted Remain, but felt we should try and move on, but over the last few days I’ve felt more down about it all – we have no leadership and now even Labour is looking as though it’s going to self combust (if that’s a word!).
It all feels like it’s going wrong.

Very well said, you echo my feelings exactly. I was saddened and angry at the political machinations of the campaign. I voted with my conscience as I did in 1975 as I believed we were better off in Europe as were my children and grandchildren. The EU is far from perfect but it is far better to try to enact change from within rather than leaving and throwing stones from the outside. I am saddened to see so much hate and racism and am no longer proud to be British. I am lucky, I live in another EU country and think of myself as European. Now it seems that the only way that I can remain European is to renounce my British citizenship. Something that I never envisaged doing.

You don’t get maths do you Henry? We aren’t in the minority. You won a 3.8% majority on a 72% turnout, and you’ve got a lot of people sorely regretting their decision. But if it makes you feel better to be sanctimonious (nice use of emojis there by the way, very classy. Do you use them when you’re debating politics with your friends?) Nice that you still think you’re on the winning side. You won. We ALL lose, that includes you too, Henry, unless you actually live on Mars, which given your parlous grasp of the situation, I am beginning to think might be true. Do you really think your comment has cast you in the best light? Really? If so, there is literally nothing to be done for you, Henry. Nothing. Go and play with your friends now.

“A lot of people sorely regretting their decision” — really? You know this how? With what data? That’s whining b.s. You are just so entitled to win and you didn’t and entitled whiners like yourself have no idea how to deal with a vote that goes other than they hope. The win is in, it’s fair and square. Get with it. Of course there wasn’t a plan. How could there be a plan until the old guard exits and allows the new guard to make a plan? THERE IS PLAN IN PLACE IN THE E.U. FOR ANY COUNTRY WHO DECIDES TO LEAVE. So there’s your plan. It starts there, and continues with new leadership, not yet in place. You sound like a 12 year old with the intelligence of a 4 year old. Go home. Shut up. Get off the internet, for you are a national embarrassment.

OK. So you’re happy to believe newspaper reports and television reports when it suits you, but not when people are whining, which I think you define as ‘anyone who disagrees with me?’ I’m not making up buyers remorse. I’d suggest you do your own research but clearly you were happy enough to make your vote without it. I really appreciate that you are using caps lock. That is exactly what a mature, rational person would do. I haven’t blamed leave voters. I have blamed politicians. I have not whinged, I have stated facts, which I’m not bothering to reiterate here, You could look them up yourself only it would spoil your utopian fantasy. I have expressed my own disappointment on my own blog, one in a sea of millions, and yet here you are, ranting away. If what i’m saying is so wrong, why don’t you just ignore it and move on. You could. I have no influence, and neither do you now. You just gave it all away. You are no better off. You voted for us all to lose and we’re losing already and we’ll keep on losing. Everything you voted for is a lie. Nothing you voted for is coming true and yet here you are with insults and shouting as if just shouting at someone and telling them to get off the internet, as if you fucking own it, is going to work. Keep shouting. Shout yourself to death for all I care. You are so not bothered by what I’m saying, me, one person in millions, that you have bothered to leave a comment? I think it’s you who needs to grow up. You literally have no idea what you are talking about but keep going, because at least you’re entertaining.

Katy, you make a lot of good articulate points in your blog, it’s an informative read. All I would say is that it would be better if you excluded the bit saying that we will pay exactly the same to be part of a common market as we do now. This isn’t a fact, no-one knows what the deal would be, and the inclusion of it in your blog detracts from the overall picture you very articulately paint. I understand your anger but it would be best directed at the politicians that orchestrated this. It comes across very aggressively and that puts you at the same level as Hurricane Henry here when you are clearly far better informed than him. Keep the upper hand here, it will make more people listen to you. And that, after all, is the purpose.

If we join the EEA which is what is being mooted by Boris, we do pay the same, sorry. Also no rebates, no grants and no veto. But we do have to accept open borders. And I am angry at the politicians. I keep repeating. I have many friends and family who voted out. I haven’t fallen out with them. I respect their decision. I am angry at the people who say the specific things I quoted in my blog and who keep lying. That seems fair. And yes, I am doing something about it.

Henry I work for a company that takes EU money and puts it to good use in our region by using it to attract additional investment from elsewhere, frequently the US. My partner works at a university where she secures and manages their EU funding. In both cases the work we do has created wealth and jobs in our region, but unfortunately none of this positive stuff formed part of the Remain campaign so it goes pretty much unseen by people such as yourself. I know you may argue that the UK will step in to replace this funding, but that is looking increasingly unlikely given how fast everyone is rowing back from the “£350m a week”. Likewise, only yesterday my partner reported that one of their academics has just been frozen out of two collaborative projects with other EU universities because they now doubt the UK’s ability to contribute to the cost of the project. There is no two-year period of transition, the impact is happening already.

it doesn’t take a genius to realise that both of our jobs will be in jeopardy and this is the price we are paying for the result. It is not so simple as simply passively accepting a new political landscape, we are going to have to completely change our lives and jobs as a result of what has happened. As you’ve clearly demonstrated in your post, there is a very worrying lack of anyone who voted leave giving a flying monkeys about this situation, nor is there anyone who seems capable of helping us formulate a plan as what to do. All anyone seems able to do is sneer at their “victory” but we are your fellow Brits and we are currently tax payers making a substantial net contribution to our society.

In time we will of course “suck it up” and we will work hard to rebuild this country as best we can, but what I’m quickly learning from the attitudes of both the vote leavers and their sorry excuses for “politicians”, we won’t be rebuilding with much help from them.

Nice try Henry …. I suggest you suck up the fight back that is gathering pace and frankly this is far more important than yahboo replies ….instead try dealing with the lies you were told to get you to vote and are now rowed back on daily .. Fishing quotas oops sorry not going to happen , free movement stopped , oops sorry not going to happen ( Dan Hanan poster boy MEP for leave ) 350 mill to the NHS oops sorry that was a mistake . Sovereignty back oops sorry unelected PM about to be announced , House of Lords still in place , it’ll all be ok will it ? Trade deals with the rest of the world oops already seeing China pull out of trade deals , Ryanair likely NOT to be investing in the UK for the next few years at least and they only represent a fraction of what’s kicking in . Goodbye Scotland but we’ll still be “Great Britain” with all the influence we had before not diminished at all REALLY ??? Oh but Europe exports more to us than we do to them …. Answer me one question on that , how do we PAY for those goods if we’re in recession ? So I guess Europe might just look to other markets to make up for the loss ! Sound familiar ? But it’s ok it’ll all be ok ! We’ll get through ?! Mmmmmm the fight goes on Henry and don’t think for a moment this is over . The U.K. hasn’t really woken up yet to the catastrophe this decision is , wait until fellow leavers suddenly realise to achieve trade with our neighbours we have to pay and accept some free movement to get it … Have a nice day !

PS really not a fan of the playschool debate style that seems to be prevalent from Leavers all “Saying that voting to leave the EU without an actual plan of action and based on a campaign of xenophobia was a bad idea is mean and makes me personally feel bad and may make me critically evaluate difficult things so you need to accept that we won and get over it/grow up/suck it up/stop being bitter/stop throwing your toys out of the pram/respect democracy”

Hello. Nice to see you back again. Are you a professional troll or do you just like hanging out on blogs you don’t agree with. Would you like a seat. Perhaps a biscuit. Nice to have you back. Any more terrifying insults you’d like to throw my way while you’re at it.

“Democracy doesn’t happy on one day and go away again.. “Unless you don’t honour the vote. Then you have signed over your right to make any significant change in future. If you say I don’t like it let’s do it again what’s to stop the next vote you agree with being overturned? By all means lobby, protest, get elected to engage in the process to get your voice heard and effect change. But redefining what democracy means, as you are here, is very, very dangerous. I voted remain but I am horrified by this outpouring against democracy.

We are not guaranteed be better off in either side (remain/ out). However at least we know we are not getting better in the EU (with facts based on that EU economics are not growing since 10 years ago). So why not giving the UK a chance to take back control instead of giving away power to the fat-paid MEP that the UK citizens didn’t vote for in the first place?
If we say all the “leavers” are racists, it’s actually so untrue. Most “leavers” lift their eyes globally and welcome skilled immigrants internationally equally including Europe.

We did vote for our MEPs. We vote for them every five years in a voting system devised by our own government. I don’t say all leavers are racists. We have control. We have always had sovereignty. it’s the government that do the things you don’t like, you just don’t realise it. 13% of your laws come from the EU and we had to agree with them in order to write them into our legislation. Our relationship with the EU is ruled by our own government. Have a problem with it? Deal with them. Don’t shoot the people who are putting billions into our economy so we can pretend we’re weathering austerity better than we are.

Well said.
The problem we have today is that everyone expects things to happen immediately, we are impatient and unwilling to give things a chance. I voted to stay in, (despite knowing that the EU, on the whole is a non democratic entity), because it is / was an economic power house and I like stability. But now as a nation we have decided to move away from this club, we could at least wait to see what, if anything happens mid to long term before we imploded and start a civil war.

If we wait too long, my fear is that there won’t be anything left. Also, I’m sorry, but I’m one woman writing a blog to stop me from punching my friends and relatives. I’m not a political pundit, despite what it sounds like. I don’t advertise my blog. It went viral. I think I’m entitled to panic if I want, on my own corner of the internet.

another 1.7% up after Brexit in fact the whole economy is looking to be just as resilient as ever. The fact that there are people like yourself that spout how angry you are over what you believed from the remain camp’s lies, scare mongering and when that didn’t work trying to profit from Jo Cox’s death which was all for nothing, just shows how ignorant and blinkered a lot of the UK are. The majority however, Scotland aside as they had their own agenda, saw through the lies and voted out. The remainders where quick to point out that the markets have crashed and that GBP was at an all time low with tweets of “thank you, we’re all doomed”, which it was for all of 20 mins before bouncing back to a higher position then the beginning of the week! Comments such as your’s cheer me up no end because it reminds me that there are some amazingly stupid people out there who believe everything they are told and refuse to research the topic for themselves.

Very well written and encapsulates so much of how I am feeling at the moment. When I woke up this morning the first thing I said to my husband was that I feel like I’m living in a bad dream. Thank you for helping me feel like I’m not alone!

You’re far from alone,if only people would spend as much effort trying to inform themselves from as wide a variety of valid sources as they do trying to shout down anyone who disagrees with them.You’ve given me a few ideas,thanks.

Thank you for articulating so much better than I could exactly how I’ve felt over the last 4 days. I didn’t think things could get worse in the wake of the vote, but they obviously have. I hope things improve, and very much fear that it will continue to be terrible for a long while before they do. Keep on writing, I love your stuff here.

Excellent piece, very well written; (I’m struggling to write much as my anger turns everything into a rant.) Good points and observation. Why is that most of the negative and knocking comments you get are from people without spellcheck and dubious punctuation?

Thanks for putting into words what I’ve been thinking and feeling since late Thursday night. The only thing I would add to your excellent piece is a rebuttal to those who are saying ‘stop disrespecting your elders. they fought and died for you so you could live the life you do’… blah blah. What they gloss over is that pretty much everyone who fought in the world wars is already dead and I rather doubt that a soldier who fought against fascism would want to vote it in!

Oh gosh! Do you think I might have a reason? Or more than one reason, or you know, facts to back up my bitterness. And yet despite that, I’m still working, out there, in my community, making a difference, what are you doing apart from leaving hilarious comments on blog posts you don’t even have to read? Slow news afternoon was it?

That’s because that’s not what this blog post is about. I have no mandate to please you. I don’t write for you, and if you are reading it and you don’t like what I’m saying, hard leave and more fool you. But here we go. Ummm, unity, peace, free border controls going both ways, cheaper air fairs, break up of monopolies, the human rights bill, economic growth for really hard pressed areas, which, I don’t know, off the top of my head include a billion quid a year for Cornwall, ditto Wales, ditto Sunderland. All gone now. Cheaper university fees, medical research grant, nearly 26% of the staff of our crumbling NHS. I could go on, but I won’t, because you know, stick with being right won’t you. You can feel morally superior while turning a blind eye to everything else.

Katy I agree with everything you say and as for democracy how can 37% of (52%of 72% turnout) the electorate change the lives of millions in the EU? Especially as they were lied to by the brexiteers and the tabloids.

I’m going to print off your post (if that’s OK with you), credit you, of course, and hand it to anyone who asks me how I feel about Brexit. This is because you have said EVERYTHING that I feel and could not put into words. I’m still at the furious stage but alongside that is heartbreak. I’ve lost my EU citizenship and that hurts a lot. When I read that Leave voters are ringing their local electoral offices and asking if they can change their vote (!) I want to scream and gnash my teeth. I don’t want to shake hands and get on with it. I want hatred and racism off our streets and I want that which has been stolen from me restored. Thank you so much for this post.

….”on the promise of a golden future”, the population is growing 500k a year off the back off a faltering framework. What will your take be when in a couple of decades when we have a pop. of 85M+ and the bottom falls out of the EU dream? How will you sustain such a population? You can’t it is unsustainable.
It is the most precarious superpower that will pull us out to sea to a point of no return and our children will have to deal with your “golden future”. History tells you that nothing lasts for long in Europe, if you think that the EU, with its fractured structure and non-aligned members, are going to last very long, then I think you are very much mistaken. You are gambling with our kids’ futures with your unproven pie dream.
Live in the now, live in the real world, cut your economic cloth to suit your purse and grow up.

You have no idea what you are talking about. When and I say when because your mandated chaps Gove and Boris agree, that we will go into the EEA, the framework is no border controls. None. The majority of our immigrants come from outside of the EU and therefore leaving the EU will not do anything whatsoever to stem that tide unless Theresa May takes action as our mandated representative who should be doing something about this. You take no account of the number of people leaving, or the fact that we are not fuckwits and everyone but everyone is agreed something had to be done about immigration but not this. Short sighted and really throwing the baby out with the bath water. You are too simplistic. Maybe it’s you who needs to grow up.

So xenaphobia rules in fractured Britain resulting from the Leavers lies. Poles insulted and attacked, are we to assume that no European is safe on England’s streets Beware if you are French, Dutch, Italian German the Nasties or should that read Nazis are after you They want you out. Raise the drawbridge and let the disunited Kingdom reign. Even Thatcher must be turning in her grave

I agree with every word. Especially the 5th and 7th points.
As an older gen voter who voted remain both times, I am particularly annoyed by those who keep saying ‘No. You shouldn’t have a 2nd referendum because it is unconstitutional to keep having referenda just because you don’t like the result’.
Well, for their education, it wouldn’t be a second referendum but rather a third because the original in 1975 did meet a two-thirds majority and should have remained in force, but was contested by those who disagreed – placing the present critics in the position of the criticised – only with a drastically reduced majority to their cause.

I so get this, I don’t live in the UK any more but it’s sad to see what’s happened and what a waste makes me so angry, like your blog hits it on the head and unfortunately I totally agree with your thoughts, wish I didn’t but the impending doom ! Good luck

The government ie Cameron called the vote and should have had plans in place for a leave vote He thought we would vote to stay so didn’t seem to bother. The leave campaigners did their job in putting the case It’s for the government now to sort the will of the people. Great time for democracy ! This is what our ancestors fought for and not to be ruled by unelected EU! Perhaps all the disaffected remainders would like to live in China Iran or Russia say then they might appreciate our democracy!

I’m glad you’re proud of the fact that you won on lies, some of which are actually heading towards the courts and the rest of which have been ditched by your own spokespeople as unworkable. Tell me, oh great genius, how do you make a plan based on unworkable lies actually work, because if you know, then maybe you should be running for parliament? It isn’t the will of the people. It’s the will of 37% who voted. You are hallucinating. It is not a great time for democracy. It is a great time for the ultra wealthy to continue to get ultra wealthy at the expense of the poor. what you voted for was Boris’s ambitions to lead the Tory party. Nobody is going to give you freedom from the EU and if you don’t understand why we can’t afford it, perhaps you should have read up on the economics of it before you started. You do know we’re going into the EEA don’t you? You do know that the EEA still binds us to Europe at the same cost but with none of the benefits don’t you? That’s your own leave champion, Boris, who said that. What about democracy now? Are you proud?

The thing is that the Leave campaigners put a number of different cases, none of which they could implement – e.g. the £350m in to the NHS. So no one actually knew what they were voting for – did you vote to leave but join the single market? Did you vote to leave and be a member of the EEA? Did you vote to leave and negotiate separate trade agreements with each EU country? Did you vote to leave and keep the financial “passport” for the City? If we join the single market with freedom of movement as the price, will you still be saying that it’s democracy? The problem is that people voted to leave something, without it being clear what they wanted next. I would be very interested to know what anyone who voted to leave thought they were getting? Other than leaving of course 🙂

Thankyou for voicing exactly how I and I know a lot of others feel. Most of us didn’t need a crystal ball to predict this utter disaster but I just can’t fit it all in to my head due to the scale and enormity of it all.

Happy that the man you chose to get us here is now negotiating a deal with the EU so we can continue trading with them? Negotiating a deal that costs the same about as our current membership? Happy that we will have to accept free border movement as a condition of it? Happy that we get no veto? Happy that every politician in the government you elected agrees and can do this for you because they have sovereignty? Good for you. You are a very special person to be so happy about something that is not going to make a single thing that you wanted to happen, happen. Very magnanimous of you.

The big picture is not that of today or tomorrow politics. The UK signed up to the European common market. A way of trading between member states and nothing else. Over the last 40 odd years that common market has evolved into the EU and will continue to grow in power and erode the real power that the UK government has on running this country. We now have a European Parliament that has influence on everything from farming to immigration and everything in between. A European currency exists and a European army will be the next step. There is already moves to create a similar union in the Americas and the Asian version including Australia is even closer. Both again being created under the con of a common market. Three world Parliaments being controlled centrally by the US federal reserve. A few days analysis, coming to the conclusion that here’s the proof, we were idiots to leave the EU is pathetic and grossly unfair. You will need to look at the progress or lack of, in a time scale of months or years. That is the only credible way of having a balanced view of our EU exit. There is an excellent documents on YouTube called ‘the Brussels business’ I suggest you take the time to watch and learn exactly what the EU is all about….. Oh and lastly was you aware that this is actually the second European common market ? The first was set up during the early 1940’s by the nazis. They understood that the best way to control European money was to centralise the way we trade and huge corporations and banks could control and distribute the wealth amongst themselves. Remove your head from the sand and open your eyes to the possibilities that now present themselves, now that we are removing ourselves from the corrupt and failure that is the EU….

The man you voted to take us into this bright new future? He’s currently negotiating to tie us into the EU at the same cost as we already pay but with less control. Brilliant. Slow. Hand. Clap. Not only that, there isn’t a politician we elected who disagrees with him. What have you actually achieved, really? And yes, I studied history I know it’s not about today, sadly I have far more idea of what tomorrow is going to be than you do.

Hi Katy really support everything you said, I have been struggling to articulate the way I feel. I know in my gut that the Leave argument is inherently wrong but I think you were a little harsh on Paul here – his is one of the few coherent Leaver posts that I have seen and I am genuinely fascinated how people who saw through the ridiculous lies of the campaign can still justify to themselves their decision.

On a different note I’d be interested in your thoughts about what would happen if sanity finally ruled and the House of Commons overruled the referendum and prevented article 50 from being enacted. Is this a pipe dream I am clinging on to? Do you think this is in the realms of possibility and if so will it come too late as by then we will have irreparably damaged our economy and/or our relationship with the other EU countries

I’m with Katy here – what do you think that you are getting instead of the EU? Are you saying that its fine not to have access to our biggest market (Europe) and that the economic decline that we are seeing is just collateral damage for us not being “ruled” by Brussels? Being poorer and having the Union broken up is totally fine because some bureaucrat in Brussels can’t tell us what to do? Even short term damage is a real problem – as an example, itv has lost 25% of its value and the pound has fallen through the floor. This makes itv a very inviting prospect for a takeover – it’s very cheap especially if you are based in the US. So over the next few months expect “proud British” companies to get snapped up by international investors at rock bottom prices. Not so much ruled by Brussels as owned by investors from the Middle East, China and the US. And no referendum would be able to change that.

Where’s Henry? I am awaiting another well thought out reply. To add to the growing financial mess it appears my home county Cornwall has sent plea to Westminster asking them to match EU grants, perhaps belatedly realism g they have effectively cut their nose off to spite their face.Interestingly Cornwall and Wales who voted leave have had little or no impact financially or otherwise from immigrants and yet ask the Brexitiers and they complain about immigrants, odd.

Hi, I’ve posted a link to your post on my Facebook page. It articulates very well what all my British friends are thinking and feeling right now. And more: I am an EU national/British resident, lived and worked as an educator in the UK for 20 years, my family and our home is here, no right to vote sadly, but doing everything else I can to contribute. Just wanted to point out that, contrary to what many may think, EU citizens who have lived for many years in the UK are concerned first and foremost about the fate and prosperity of this country which is our home too. We also feel the economic heat, just as you have described in your post, and are enraged by the resurgence of the far right. I fell totally heartbroken for my British students and my colleagues here who are as angry and as desperate as anyone else. I’ll leave all my other concerns out of this reply now, just wanted to let you guys know that we share the pain and it is not out of self-interest.

I am also an EU citizen living here, albeit not as long and discovered, unfortunately only days before the vote and too late to register, that we are allowed to vote! This is another thing the remain campaign should have made clear – imagine adding all the EU people who live here to the remain! I have now registered just in case we do have another chance to turn this around.

The EU exports 290bn to us, we export 220bn to them, but their population is 440m, and ours 65m. So as that’s £650 per head in the EU and £3400 per head here, we’re five times more exposed to a trade war than they are.

Can’t argue with anything you’ve said here. I’m not happy, I’m really upset by the result of this vote. I don’t believe that this is a majority result and it does make me laugh with all the “pathetic” comments from some brexiters about the petition for a second referendum, when not 24 hours earlier they were telling everyone to vote using pens as the government were going to change their vote (does this sound like the kind of people who would actually take the defeat with the good grace that they are telling us to?) I am fed up of being told to relax, and grow up when i state that I am genuinely worried about the future, and was actually told by someone that if it all goes wrong then i can say “I told you so”. if it all goes wrong I won’t be bothered about being right, I’ve never wanted to be wrong more in my life, but don’t dress up my concerns as pathetic and tell me to “chill out”. That’s all I have to say – great blog – keep up all the good work you are clearly doing!!

The thing that riles me most is this smug “we invented democracy, so look how superior we are” stuff. We have a representative democracy, which is supposed to do exactly that: represent us and after careful consideration and debate make political decisions. If that works, why do we need referenda? Because it doesn’t work, because our first past the post system allows a party that gets maybe only 35% of the vote to have more or less absolute power for 5 years. So large numbers of people are disenfranchised. Worse: in the panic to try to be first past the post by a margin of one, Davis Cameron offered a referendum to placate his right wing and reduce the risk of UKIP splitting his vote and losing him seats. maybe he thought continuing the coalition with the LibDems would save him by stopping the referendum. But he accidentally won a majority.

So, Katy, if you’ve joined the Electoral Reform Society, I hope it’s so that we get a proper, modern, representative, proportional voting system of democracy, which would have avoided all this mess.

Couldn’t agree more – but if I may add another paragraph, the silence about Northern Ireland and the possible border issue there has been terrible. I didn’t realise (so again – how can anyone make an informed choice when so much was avoided / not spoken about) that this will cause very real problems because the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland will, in the future, not be able to allow free passage between the two. Just think that through. Border guards. Soldiers. Building a solid border between the two back up. After years of negotiating peace, all that is in jeopardy because we have voted to leave.

I liked your paragraph about democracy – that’s what my Leave friends keep saying, yet they all voted leave for specific reasons – none of them will accept responsibility for the whole package – my pension is worth around 6% less than it was last week and my business (in recruitment) has ground to a halt. Apparently that is unimportant as we have “taken back control” – of what no one seems sure.

I have also signed petitions, joined a political party and actually started talking to my friends about what I believe in – I used to keep quite before, thinking it was no ones business but mine. Maybe if we all talk more (respectfully) then we might understand things before we make major decisions.

I enjoyed reading your article – it mirrored my own sense of frustration and impotence.

Great piece and thanks for writing it. I agree with every word. I am 65 and voted remain as did everyone of my immediate family. I feel scared by what is happening and will continue to happen. As a group, we remainers all need to keep asking questions, rattling cages and making life uncomfortable for the people who lied and will be happy to line their own pockets and walk away with untroubled consciences. My country feels out of control at present and there is no one who knows what to do to sort out the mess we have created. Inevitably it will be mainly the poor and those in already deprived areas who will come off worse and they were the ones who were duped.

You may be right, but it makes me so angry when remain voters (I, being one of them) call the poor gullible. It’s is such a terrible assumption to make and does not help the situation. There are many, many middle class, well educated people who voted leave.

The stupid politicians who are accepting this as “decisive” are scared some kind of civil war will break out if they go against the so called will of the people. This is not the will of the people this is no better than a coin toss. If they go ahead anyway then the angry 48% are not going away and there will be civil unrest anyway.

Yet another presumably middle-class millennial flipping out in the now familiar beseeching tone.

It’s funny that divvy millennials who a few days ago knew how to post self-absorbed piffle onto the internet and little else are now:

1. Finance experts talking about the FTSE and currencies.
2. Ambitious go-getters who were about to ‘work all over Europe’
3. Mind readers who know how ‘racist’ Leave voters are
4. Experts in the EU bureaucracy
6. People who know better than the old codgers that have lived through various stages of the EU project and seen how it’s panned out.

You know what? I was born in 1972. I grew up in a working class home in relative poverty. I was teased at school for my jumble sale clothes and the fact that my mum made her own bread. I grew up through the Thatcher years and the riots and the dole queues hitting a million and I’ve been on benefits, despite having been to university. But if it pleases you to dismiss elitist tosh, good for you. If it pleases you to talk shite about something you don’t know anything about, and let’s face it, you’ve had a few weeks practice before you got to cast your vote, please go ahead. I’ve got all day.

Thanks for your post Katy.I feel as if there’s a black cloud over my head.I wake up in the morning and remember what’s happened and am full of disbelief that this can happen to the UK.What a shambles.Many of my colleagues are EU citizens and now just want to go home.My son’s girlfriend works in a shop with a man who has dark skin.A couple of thugs went into the shop yesterday and said’We voted for you to go home’.When he argued with them, he was punched in the face.I feel desperately sad at what’s happening.I do not want to be associated with the likes of Boris or Nigel.Odious men and liars.I have written to my MP and I will read into electoral reform.It might help my sense of hopelessness.

At the obvious risk of sounding patronising and superior (because I am) a quick riffle through the comments on here does indicate the Brexit brigade are not that bright. And quite keen at throwing insults around.

The former perhaps explains their staggeringly stupid, shot-in-the-foot vote.

The latter explains the worrying way this totally pointless referendum is dividing the country, and will do so for a long time to come.

And to think it was all done just to keep a minor wing of the Conservative party quiet; and an absolute nonentity by the name of Farage

I am totally saddened by a lot of reactions to the referendum. It seems that some people have been in a dolly day dream as the referendum approached. They were ok so they assumed that everyone else was. The political parties are so similar there was no choice between them, so general elections didn’t help. Until we make sure everyone has enough food to eat, a roof over their heads, an education and health system that works for them, proper care for the elderly and feels safe, and a job be surprised that if asked they say they want change. I’ d be more impressed if people were advocating for these improvements , but at this has woken up the country.

Thanks for this. Very eye opening. One thing you might add for your democracy argument: the economic impact which was predicted by remainers and mocked by leavers is happening. New information = valid reason for new vote. From an American terrified of a Trump presidency.

Im trying to look at some of the plus points that have come out of this referendum and one of the biggest for me was the proportion of the younger generation who voted to stay. With the world the way it is today terrorism on the rise and the strengthening of far right political party’s I exspected the youth in general to be very anti europe. But with the huge percentage voting to remain i think this shows the facist far right groups are not getting their claws into the minds of our children and the exact opposite is happening. I sincerly hope we can have another referendum in 10 years time rejoin the EU and put this stupidity behind us.

Summed up everything I am feeling too. I too researched before I made my vote to remain. I too am fed up with leavers telling me to calm down and wait. Wait for what???? There’s nothing happening! It’s all a mess! And I dont feel calm because I feel like none of the government are really doing anything and they all look like bunnies in the headlights! !!!! Particularly Boris!!!! Ffs x

Thank you for this Katy. I wrote something similar to try to articulate my own rage at the pointlessness of our present situation, so it was good to find someone else doing the same. All the facts and the available evidence suggest this decision is the wrong one. But most voters don’t base decisions on empirical evidence so here we are. It is one of the many reasons we, like the institutions of the EU, have a system of representative democracy and why this referendum should not have taken place. Yet it did and if it mobilises more of us to realise that the electorate can be the plaything of a few privileged egotists who have an elastic relationship with the truth and that we should push back against that, some small good may yet emerge. Personally I am not prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with people like Farage and the far right, regardless of the position of others, so I too need to find a way to oppose the path we are being forced down. I salute you for your contribution and for standing up to the trolls.

I agree 100% with everything you’ve said here. To say that I’m sad, angry, frustrated… just doesn’t do justice to the way I really feel about this. Throughout the campaign I thought it was clear for everyone to see that it was all lies, I thought common sense would prevail. I’m worried about the future of this country, but also I’m angry that my EU citizenship, something I value so so much, is going to be taken away from me.

Glad to hear you’ve joined a political party. Hope its the Greens, who had the biggest Remain majority according to Ashcroft’s poll. But if it’s Labour, get active because Corbyn will need to be re-elected.

Thank you Katy for such an articulate, well written article. I wake every morning with a sense of dread at what has happened and will continue to happen, unless we are able to continue in the EU. On a lighter note I laughed out loud at your phrase “unelected fuckwits” ………. sums them up perfectly.

We saw this coming and we moved lock stock and two smoking barrels to France before our English assets could become our English losses… Leaving was not at all easy, but I live in a socially ( yes socially) democratic country now… I strongly suggest the 48% vote with their feet ….

I suspect your article encapsulates what thousands of us are trying to put in legible terms. It’s an abomination, terrifying, ridiculous, divisive etc etc etc….I can’t put into words the disaster I see unfolding internationally, let alone nationally. Thanks for wording it with so much clarity x

A perfect summation of how I, and close family and friends are feeling and thinking, katy. I am scared and feel utterly disgusted at the absolute chaos that has ensued this referendum. Racist, unprovoked attacks on immigrants who have been living peacefully and rightfully in the UK up to recent days, now fearing for their safety?! There is certainly nothing “great” about the Great Britain we reside in at present! I feel frustrated at the venomous, scathing attitude (of a proportion) of LEAVE voters and at their ignorance regarding the repercussions of their decision. The problem, as I see it, has been that there has not been sufficient dialogue between the politicians, the various sectors of our communities, the wider union as a whole and the business sectors. We have been offered “one, solitary vote” , whereas this should have been brought to the table as part of an ongoing, transparent, open discourse between all parties, in order to identify over a period of time how the country’s residents feel about the possibility of change…total change and withdrawal from a place of security; whether that be national and/or fiscal. We talk about the retreat from the EU taking a period of over 2 years, from submission of article 50 to the final cessation of our participation. Why then should this have been offered to the masses as a single vote? Would it not have been sensible to ensure that both campaigning parties have a fully equipped mandate of how things would be realised post referendum outcome, particularly in light of a possible LEAVE outcome, as this was certainly a new entity for the country as a whole? Instead we now find ourselves in a climate of xenophobic, financial and national demise….and we simply have to “deal with it”!!??!! (In the very articulate and eloquent turn of phrase used by so many of our learned LEAVE supporters!)

A Facebook friend posted this link. I don’t usually read these to the end, mainly because I find them hard to follow. However, this kept me gripped to the end. Very eloquent, accessible and entertaining. A shame the reality it refers to is such a downer.

You are absolutely allowed to be outraged and to have opinions, and to voice them. I don’t think anyone should tell you to calm down. Luckily all the leave voters and the rest of us remain voters who are not losing our minds over this have a choice whether or not we read the rantings of those who think that the leave voters are stupid. They are not, they just want different things from the remain voters. Just like in any other election or vote, and they, just like the rest of us in this democracy, are entitled to their opinion and their vote. And both sides are allowed to fight for what they believe in.

My one observation about the EU, despite voting remain, is that it is falling apart somewhat. It needs to change. I am originally from Europe and I have family in a few different EU countries, and the fact is, that the EU is succeeding in some aspects, but it is failing large groups of people who are all just as angry and outraged at the EU, as you are at the leave campaign.

And so even thought I voted remain, I do think that some other remain voters will do well to remember that the EU has failed millions of people who chose to be a part of them in the first place and who feel that they were sold false ideals.

We, as humans, need to work harder to be sympathetic towards each other, even though we may not have the same needs or opinions as each other.

I voted out, this was mainly a protest vote to make the government and brussels wake up and realise that there needs to be reform within the EU. Many respected people on the in camp have confirmed there needs to be policy change and I don’t expect us to come out of the EU, my gut feel is that here will be renegotiation to keep us in which will please the majority of people of the U.K.

Some of my friends and family think other than this but I respect their thoughts and would never think to try and convince them other wise. PS, I am not a racist, not cleaver but not thick just a normal person that was allowed to vote as a free person. I also work for a multi national bank that told me my job was at risk of the vote went to the out campaign so I had to look hard into the out come we have come to.

I hope you manage to stop this topic from taking over your life and ruining you friends and family relationships.

Again, my gut feel is that you will not have to leave the EU but we as a nation have lit the fuse to get the polititions to listen that things need to be addressed. When this does happen I can assure you that the majority of out campaigners ( excluding mindless racists) will be equally happy with the result.

Everything you said…..plus the fact that I’ve heard the incessant whinging of the ‘leave’ side all my life calling for a second referendum on EU and now they’ve won it and the vote I’m expected to suckling it up and stop moaning after less than a week! Jog on! I may even keep it up for 40 years.
Let’s be honest if it had gone the other way Farage would still be banging on he even said he would call for a second referendum in the same situation

Yes. To everything you’ve said in the post AND in your comment replies. The sheer ignorance of so many people is astounding to me. I’m not just disappointed, I’m devastated and I’m beyond disgusted. And as a brown face born and bred in London, I am for the first time in my 44 years, feeling unwelcome and unsafe in my own fucking country. In the eyes of bigots across the country, this vote has legitimised their behaviour and they think that they now have a mandate for their disgusting behaviour. They genuinely think 17 million people are behind them. And honestly, I think a fair percentage of those 17 million are, even though they don’t like to think so. The whole situation is hideous and terrifying.

‪#‎Brexit‬ is becoming a very bad joke. I have never in my life seen so many people squirming to deny what was a RESOUNDING democratic result. Where the pollsters were nearly all wrong, and wrong by an enormous margin of a minimum of 5 percentage points. The Remainers pulling out all logical stops and coming up with the most drivel-ridden anti-democratic excuses to make their unmakeable point and get their way … is just UNBELIEVABLE!!! And you know, unbelievably, they just might get there. It is just CRAZY, what is going on!!!
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I’m sure it would have been “democratic” enough for them, had Remain won. Big LOL. Too funny. It is like a couple of kids arguing about the result of the first “winner take all” game, and the loser then saying “best of three.”

The FACT is that it was NOT a low voter turnout. The FACT is there is no such rule in place (72%, 75%, 80%, or what have you!!). The FACT is that it was a democratic result reached after both sides did their best to communicate their pros and cons. And the FACT is that Remainers got their asses kicked fairly and squarely.

It wasn’t even CLOSE! General elections are usually decided on smaller margins!

You do NOT get to change the rules after the event (especially when you would have eaten it up had it gone the other way). You do NOT get to weasel out of the result on the grounds that it was not democratic. You do NOT get to speak for an electorate and say people did not understand. The die is cast, and the chips have fallen (DEMOCRATICALLY!!!) where they have.

As I have pointed out countless times now, to seemingly countless whingeing and sour-grapes Remainers, the surpassing IRONY is that you now want to go AGAINST democracy because the result doesn’t suit you!!! Can anything BE more ironic? I don’t think so! Although, I guess given the profoundly undemocratic nature of the EU institution you support … I really shouldn’t be that surprised.

This is now a JOKE. Remainers … and their pathetic campaign for another referendum, and the UK leaders’ pathetic stalling on the actioning of Article 50 … are a JOKE. The UK is a laughing stock of anti-democracy in the eyes of the world.

Of course there is going to be market volatility with such a big decision. Although, I would argue that ongoing volatility is moreso about the INDECISION with respect to implementing Article 50, than it is about Brexit itself. If the UK leaders simply decisively followed the wishes of their electorate and started getting on with being a sovereign country again, the world (and markets) would react FAVOURABLY. For as long as that gutless indecision continues, it will continue to be an unholy mess. To blame the Brexit itself for the mess resulting from the anti-democratic indecisiveness of the UK’s utterly gutless “leaders” is both disingenuous and wrong.

In the meantime, and until the democratic result is respected and enacted, the UK will continue to be a laughing stock in the eyes of the world. 😦

Hello, Nick. You do know that the leave campaign were the ones who set up the petition to contest the result of the election should it go 52/48 in remain’s favour and that the man who launched it is now complaining? It’s your side that set it in motion, just as it was your side, Nigel Farage in fact, who said that he would contest it. Don’t try to slide the blame onto other people, and I would really advise you, if you’re going to take up trolling full time, to a) get some facts, b) use less caps lock and emojis because it makes you look as CRAZY as the people you are criticising, and c) don’t waste your bile on me. What do you think I care about your opinion? Take it to someone who gives a shit.

Well, at least you eventually, belatedly published my opinion Katy! I’ll give you some points for that at least! But, sadly, (and as with the rest of the anti-democratic Remainers), the fact you don’t “give a shit” about the opinion of the democratic majority is plainly obvious! But thanks for personally confirming that for everybody. LOL 🙂

Oh Nick. I’m so glad you are the entire voice for all the leave party. What an important person you must be! Just as I am, of course, the entire voice for the remain party. Listen to yourself man. Go and find someone else to talk to, there’s a good chap.